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THINKING SHANGHAI
A Foucauldian Interrogation of the Postsocialist Metropolis
思
Gregory Bracken
THINKING SHANGHAI
China’s recent re-emergence as a world power is one of the transformative events of our
念
time, and the most visible manifestations of the country’s continuing rise can be seen in its
two greatest cities: Beijing and Shanghai. Since its inception as a colonial enclave in 1842,
Gregory Bracken
Shanghai has been one of the world’s largest, richest, and most important cities. Traditionally
it has set the pace of change in China, and acted as a model for the rest of the country, both as
上
an icon of capitalism before 1949 and as a paragon of state-planning after that period. Shang-
hai today, with a population of approximately 20 million, is a mega-city, and the sometimes
bewildering pace of development since 1990 has seen it grow even richer as it re-emerges
onto the international stage. Zhu Rongji has compared Shanghai to New York, and even Time
海
magazine has labelled the city ‘a rival to New York City as the “Center of the World” in the
21st century’. This investigation asks can Shanghai indeed become the New York of Asia?
And as it does so it also investigates Shanghai’s role in a world where one of the most interest-
ing developments unfolding in the 21st century will be not so much the effects globalisation is
having on China, rather the effects China is having on globalisation.
TU Delft
Proefschrift
door
Gregory BRACKEN
Master of Science in Architecture, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Bachelor of Science in Architecture, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Diploma in Architecture, Bolton Street College of Technology, Dublin, Ireland
1
Dit proefschrift is goedgekeurd door de promotor:
Prof.dr. A. Graafland
Samenstelling promotiecommissie:
2
SUMMARY
This work is an investigation into Shanghai’s role in the twenty-first century as it attempts to rejoin the
global city network. It also examines the effects this move is having on the city, its people, and its public
spaces. Shanghai’s intention to turn itself into the New York of Asia is not succeeding, in fact the city
might be better trying to become the Chicago of Asia instead. As one of Saskia Sassen’s ‘global cit-
ies’ Shanghai functions as part of a network that requires face-to-face contact, but it has also been able
to benefit from links that were forged during the colonial era (1842 to c.1949). In fact, the new global
elites who have made cities like Shanghai their home have ended up living much like former ones; with
the result that their needs are pushing out the very people who used to call this city home. These are the
people who inhabit what Manuel Castells calls the ‘Fourth World’ (what this research refers to as the
‘analogue archipelago’).
Manuel Castells’s notion of the ‘network society’ also shows how recent developments in glo-
balisation have resulted in qualitative social and economic changes because they operate in real time.
Globalisation, however, does not necessarily mean Westernisation. In fact, there is a strong neo-Confu-
cian ethos underpinning China’s recent resurgence, which in turn has important ramifications for how
Chinese people perceive public space. Shanghai’s new public space is curiously dead – and while Asians
tend to blur distinctions between public and private more than we do in the West (which can render
these spaces harder to read for Westerners) – the fault lies more with the fact that some of Shanghai’s
new public spaces are simply ‘left-over’ spaces, particularly in front of the newer skyscrapers. This
space has been designed for movement, not for use, and it contrasts starkly with the traditional alleyway
houses of the colonial-era city where communal activity, graduated privacy, and organised complexity
made for a rich and dynamic street life.
Part II of this thesis deals with colonialism, noting how Shanghai has benefitted from its justly
famous colonial history in its attempts to rejoin the global city network. Colonialism is carefully differ-
entiated from imperialism, although it is noted that both were premised on industrial innovations, partic-
ularly Britain’s, in the nineteenth century. Part II also examines Hong Kong’s and Singapore’s role in the
global city network, the better to understand Shanghai; and a useful comparison has been made between
Shanghai’s alleyway houses and the Singapore shophouse with regard to public space and the possibili-
ties for rehabilitation and reuse.
Part III is perhaps the most important section of this thesis, particularly its use of Michel Fou-
cault’s theories of space and power relations and how these are inscribed in a built environment. This
Part also highlights the use that has been made of Foucault’s work by other academics, notably Edward
W. Said in Orientalism. Said saw some good things as having resulted from Western hegemony over
that part of the world he defines as the Orient but generally tends to regard imperialistic influence as de-
bilitating and dangerous. Use has also been made of some critics of Said’s work, notably Robert Irwin
and Ibn Warraq, who maintain that Said overvalued the role of the intellectual, and more dangerously,
misunderstood the Foucauldian notion of discourse, which is what led him to make some of his most
damaging statements about European racism against the Orient. By way of contrast, David Grahame
Shane’s application of the Foucauldian notion of the heterotopia – to Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled
City – is an apposite and accurate use of one of Foucault’s theories.
Part IV examines China’s rich and ancient culture, noting as it does so that cultures are con-
structed, and more importantly, asking how they are constructed. Manuel Castells sees the construction
of identities as using materials from history, geography, biology, productive and reproductive institu-
tions, as well as from collective memory and personal fantasies, and even from power apparatuses and
religious revelation; this thesis’s examination of the Chinese mentalité is an important exercise in help-
ing to comprehend what is happening in Shanghai today.
Cities are not about buildings and streets; cities are about people, and their networks of interac-
tion. Any study of a city must take account of the warm life of its inhabitants and not allow itself to be
blinded by the cold geometries of stone. This examination of what has gone wrong with Shanghai’s new
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public spaces was greatly aided by an understanding of the Chinese language itself, which in turn led to
the conclusion that the Western term ‘public’ might be better transliterated into Chinese as chang (which
means ‘open-air’) rather than the more usual gong (or ‘public’), especially when describing Shanghai’s
new public space.
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SUMMARY (in Dutch)
Dit proefschrift is een onderzoek naar de rol die Shanghai’s in de 21e eeuw speelde in haar poging tot
aansluiting aan het ‘global city network’. Het behandelt tevens het effect die deze ontwikkeling heeft
op de stad, de mensen, en zijn openbare ruimte. Shanghai’s intentie zich te transformeren tot het New
York van Asia blijft echter zonder success en het zou er in plaats daarvan wellicht beter aan doen zich
te meten met Chicago. Als één van Sakia Sassen’s ‘global cities’ functioneert Shanghai als deel van
een network dat direct contact behoeft, het is echter ook in staat geweest te profiteren van connecties
die opgelegd werden gedurende het koloniale tijdperk (van 1842 tot c.1949). De werkelijkheid is dat
de nieuwe wereld elite, die steden als Shanghai met hun hogere levensstandaard tot hun residentie ge-
maakt hebben hetzelfde pad volgen als hun voorgangers daarmee de mensen die het voordien hun thuis
noemde verdrijven. Dit zijn de mensen die wat Manuel Castells de ‘Fourth World’ noemt bewonen (in
dit onderzoek gerefereerd aan als ‘analogue archipelago’).
Manuel Castells’s idee van de ‘network society’ laat ook zien hoe recente ontwikkelingen in de
globalisatie geresulteerd heeft in kwalitatieve sociale en economische veranderingen omdat ze plaats-
vinden in ‘real time’ Echter globalisatie betekent niet zonder meer verwestering. Er is in feite een sterke
neo-Confuciaanse stemming dien de recente opgang van China ondersteunt, wat op zich weer een belan-
grijke invloed heeft op de manier waarop de Chinese mensen met openbare ruimte omgaan. De nieuwe
publieke ruimtes van Shanghai is merkwaardig genoeg zo goed levenloos – en terwijl bij de Aziaten
het onderscheid tussen publieke en openbare ruimten meer schijnt te vervagen dan in het Westen (wat
het voor Westerners moeilijker maakt deze ruimtes te bevatten), de fout ligt eigenlijk meer bij het feit
dat somige openbare ruimtes bestaan uit overgebleven plekken, speciaal voor de nieuwe wolkenkrab-
bers. Deze openbare ruimtes zijn ontworpen voor doorgang niet voor gebruik, en ze staan in fel contrast
met de traditionele ‘Alleyway Houses’ van de koloniale-tijdperk stad waar gemeenschaps activiteiten,
‘graduated privacy’, en georganiseerde complexiteit de grondvesten waren voor een rijk en dynamisch
straatleven.
Deel II van dit proefschrift behandelt het kolonialisme, waar we kunnen vaststellen dat Shanghai
geprofiteerd heeft van zijn koloniale erfgoed bij zijn pogingen om zich weer met het ‘Global City Net-
work’ te verenigen. Kolonialisme wordt uitgebreid in vergeliking gebracht met imperialisme maar het
is duidelijk dat beide hun basis vonden in de industriele innovatie, met name in het Verenigd Koninkrijk
in de negentiende eeuw. Om Shanghai beter te begrijpen behandelt deel II ook de rol van Hong Kong en
Singapore binnen het ‘Global City Network’ en een nuttige vergelijking is gemaakt tussen de Shanghai’s
‘Alleyway Houses’ en de Singapore ‘Shophouse’ met betrekking tot de openbare ruimtes en de mogeli-
jkheid voor herstel en hergebruik.
Deel III is misschien wel het belangrijkste deel van dit proefschrift, met name door het gebruik
van Michel Foucault’s theorien over ruimte en kracht relaties en hoe deze zijn vertaald naar een bebou-
wde omgeving. Dit gedeelte benadrukt tevens het gebruik van Foucault’s werk door andere academici
in het bijzonder Edward Said in Orientalism. Said zag enige goede zaken die voortkwamen van de
Westerse hegemonie over dat gedeelte van de wereld dat hij definieert als de Orient maar over het al-
gemeen imperialistische invloed als slopend en gevaarlijk beschouwd. Er is ook gebruik gemaakt van
sommige critici van Said’s werk, met name Robert Erwin en Ibn Warraq die beweren dat Said de rol van
de intellectuelen overschatte, en, erger nog, hij begreep de Foucauldian notie van betoog niet, hetgeen
hem bracht tot het maken van een van zijn meest schadelijke bewering over Europees racisme tegenover
de Orient. Daarentegen is David Grahame Shane’s toepassing van de Foucauldian notie van de ‘hetero-
topia’ – op Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City – een treffend en nauwgezet gebruik van een van Fou-
cault’s theorieen.
Deel IV behandelt China’s rijke en aloude kultuur, vaststellend dat kulturen gebouwd worden,
en belangrijker, hoe ze gebouwd worden. Manuel Castells ziet de contructie van identiteiten als het ge-
bruikmaken van materialen uit de geschiedenis, geografie, biologie, produktieve en reproduktieve insti-
tuten, alsmede van collectief geheugen en persoonlijke fantasieen, en zelfs meer van krachtmiddelen en
5
religieuse onthullingen; het onderzoek naar de Chinese ‘mentalité’ in dit proefschrift is een belangrijke
oefening om te helpen te begrijpen wat er momenteel in Shanghai plaatsvindt.
Het gaat in steden niet om gebouwen en straten, steden zin mensen, en hun netwerk van in-
teractie. Bij iedere studie van een stad moet het warme leven van zijn bewoners betrokken worden en
men moet zich niet blind staren op de koude geometrie van steen. Begrip van de Chinese taal zelf heeft
aanzienlijk bijgedragen aan het onderzoek naar wat er mis is gegaan met Shanghai’s nieuwe openbare
ruimtes wat leidde tot de conclusie dat de Westerse term ‘openbaar’ beter vertaald kan worden in het
Chinees als chang (wat ‘openlucht’ betekend) dan het gebruikelijke gong (ofwel ‘openbaar’), met name
wanneer we het hebben over Shanghai’s nieuwe openbare ruimtes.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 9
Introduction 10
PART I: SHANGHAI
1. Shanghai Now 14
2. The Global City Network 23
3. China Resurgent 41
4. Pudong 54
5. Public Space, Empty Space 60
6. The ‘Alleyway House’ and Xintiandi 73
Conclusion 220
Appendices
1. Russia and Japan as part of the ‘West’ 222
2. Chinese Dynasties 224
3. Chinese Inventions 225
4. Chinese Terms 226
5. Chinese Philosophy and Religion 231
Bibliography 238
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List of Illustrations
1. Map of Shanghai 10
2. Map of East Asia 11
3. Pudong 13
4. The Bund 14
5. Map of Greater Shanghai 54
6. Shanghai city model 55
7. Lujiazui, artist’s impression 60
8. Century Avenue, Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, Pudong 61
9. Jin Mao Tower 62
10. World Financial Centre 63
11. Alleyway house, Jing An Villa, aerial view 73
12. Shikumen, Wenmiao Road 74
13. Alleyway house, Jing An Villa, main alleyway 75
14. Alleyway house, Jing An Villa, side alleyway 76
15. Xintiandi, aerial view 77
16. Map of Shanghai, 1929 84
17. Map of pre-colonial Shanghai 86
18. Map of Shanghai’s colonial growth, 1842-1914 87
19. Shanghai’s colonial growth superimposed on current city 88
20. Cut-away isometric of a typical Singapore shophouse 119
21. Plan of alleyway house cluster, Beijing Road West 121
22. Plan of alleyway houses 121
23. Plan of Singapore city centre 122
24. Kowloon Walled City, aerial view 179
25. Plan of Kowloon Walled City 181
26. Siheyuan, artist’s impression 194
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to Prof Arie Graafland for the opportunity of doing this work in the first place, and for his ex-
cellent reading recommendations, mostly I would like to thank Arie for his carefully considered critique
of my work, the insightful nature of which has greatly enriched it. I would also like to thank Patrick
Healy, whose advice and support has been wonderful – consisting of encouragement (when it was need-
ed) and coffee (when it wasn’t) – I also owe Patrick a huge debt of gratitude for undertaking the thank-
less task of reading this thesis in MS form at its early stages. To Gerhard Bruyns I owe a special debt
of gratitude for all his help in compiling this thesis MS into book form, I simply could not have done it
without him. My thanks, too, go to Dr Heidi Sohn for all her support, enthusiasm and also her excellent
reading recommendations; Prof Taeke de Jong for his enthusiasm, constructive criticism, and the won-
derfully useful map he made for me (which can be seen at fig.19); Thian Hoe Yeo, for being such an ex-
cellent (and patient) Chinese teacher; Darren Ying, for helping with my Chinese (as well as the weekly
lunches at the Empire Café in Singapore’s Raffles Hotel which got me out and about when I needed it);
and finally to Robert Cortlever, for simply everything else.
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INTRODUCTION
I have seen places that were, no doubt, as busy and as thickly populous as the Chinese city in Shanghai,
but none that so overwhelmingly impressed me with its business and populousness. In no city, West or
East, have I ever had such an impression of dense, rank, richly clotted life. Old Shanghai is Bergson’s
élan vital in the raw, so to speak, and with the lid off. It is life itself.
Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey1
‘Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and
retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgement and disposition of business’,
so says Francis Bacon in Of Empire. This examination of Shanghai aims to engage in the rich discourse
that has surrounded the city since China
once again opened up to the world.
Judgments will not be made on the new
architecture of the city, good or bad; nor
is it intended to be a eulogy for the van-
ishing way of life in its colonial core.
What is of primary concern to this re-
search is the new phenomena of Shang-
hai’s urban environment, particularly its
public space.
Studies of Shanghai seem to
concentrate an undue amount of atten-
tion on the price of property in Pudong
and other newly developed areas, some-
times to the exclusion of other, less
tangible concerns, like the quality of
Figure 1. Map of Shanghai (source: Shanghai shi di tu) life. This investigation will make use of
relevant statistics – how could it not and
claim to be a complete survey? – but is concerned more with issues of a less tangible nature. The title
Thinking Shanghai comes from the fact that Michel Foucault was concerned with questioning our ways
of thinking rather than simply locating themes to apply (as in the ‘toolkit’ metaphor). Translating the
verb ‘to think’ into Chinese is rather difficult as there are a number of ways for doing so: for example,
jue de; ren wei; xiang, among others. These terms can capture – depending on their context – the act of
thinking as either an intention, or as a feeling or emotion, or as the idea that results from a process of
reasoning. The difficulties and delights of the Chinese language will be examined in Part IV, it is enough
to mention here the nuanced and multi-faceted way the Chinese have of approaching the act of thinking,
making it the point of departure for this thesis’s exploration of Shanghai.
M. Christine Boyer asks: ‘Can Shanghai regain its status as one of the great metropolises of the
world with a new cosmopolitan spirit open to the West?’2. Or as the Chinese like to put it, can Shanghai
turn itself into the New York of Asia? The short answer is no, it may make more sense to try and become
the Chicago of Asia instead. Part I of this research looks at China’s recent and remarkable resurgence,
noting the neo-Confucian ethos that underpins it. The phenomenon known as ‘capitalism with Chinese
characteristics’ has led to a resurgence that has profound implications for the Chinese way of life, and
potentially for the rest of the world. Shanghai’s global ambitions are examined through the lens of Sas-
1 Huxley seems to have taken the title Jesting Pilate from a quotation of Francis Bacon: ‘What is Truth?
said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer’.
2 M. Christine Boyer, ‘Approaching the Memory of Shanghai: The Case of Zhang Yimou and “Shanghai
Triad” (1995)’ from Shanghai Reflections, Mario Gandalsonas, ed., p. 59.
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kia Sassen’s definition of the ‘global city’ as well as Manuel Castells’s ‘network society’, the resultant
‘global city network’ takes cognisance of Hong Kong and Singapore’s roles in this network, the better to
understand Shanghai’s position today.
Asians tend to blur distinctions between public and private, in examining the effects
globalisation is having on the public spaces of Shanghai, the city’s newer spaces will be contrasted to
those of the older and more vibrant colonial parts of city, particularly the alleyway houses. One of the
most important points this research will make is that Shanghai’s new public space is simply ‘left-over’
space, with empty plazas in front of new skyscrapers designed for movement not for use, with the result
that they lack the richness and variety of the old alleyway house spaces.
Part II deals with colonialism and imperialism because Shanghai’s colonial history has lent the
city’s attempts to rejoin the global city network a certain weight. Hong Kong and Singapore’s roles as
cities that have made the transition from colonial enclaves to nodes in the global city network will also
be examined, including the fact that all of these cit-
ies enjoy an enviable geographical position which has
helped underpin their success. Part II also examines
the shophouse typology of Singapore to see if it can
act as a useful model for the rehabilitation and reuse of
Shanghai’s dwindling stock of alleyway houses.
Part III looks at the work of Michel Foucault,
particularly his analysis of space and its role in how
power relations are inscribed in the built environment.
Beginning with an overview of his archaeological
and genealogical analyses, these are developed into a
newer and more dynamic methodology known as ‘con-
sanguinity’. This analysis will show how power is ex-
ercised on the body not as a property but as a strategy,
and how domination can be achieved via manoeuvres
and tactics in a network of relations that is constantly
in tension. In examining the public space of Shanghai’s
alleyway houses, this research will contend that the
use of this space reflects the Foucauldian notion of the
Panopticon, but in a benign way. Jeremy Bentham’s
Figure 2. Map of East Asia (source: author famous creation rendered visibility into a trap, in
drawing) the Shanghai alleyway house visibility occurs in the
hierarchical arrangement of the space – the graduated
privacy – and it is this which enables its rich social life to develop. Without a central control tower (as
in the Benthamite Panopticon), the Shanghai alleyway house renders people visible from every point,
to every point. In positing this theory, Foucault’s pessimistic notion of the panoptic society, and the
carceral archipelago, are rejected. Distancing this research from the more usual reading of Foucault has
enabled it to posit the thesis that the social visibility of the benign panopticon in the Shanghai alleyway
house has engendered the rich and vibrant social life it enjoys; and it is this that the city should be
seeking to recapture when attempting gentrification projects such as Xintiandi, not merely trying to
retain the shells of empty houses.
Part III also highlights some of Foucault’s theories as used by other scholars, notably Edward
W. Said, who maintained that Western hegemony over the Orient resulted from an imperialism that was
directly influenced and facilitated by the discourse of Orientalism. David Grahame Shane’s use of the
Foucauldian notion of the heterotopia (to describe Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong) is also high-
lighted as an example of an apposite use of Foucault’s theory.
Part IV deals with China and culture in an attempt to understand the Chinese mentalité. China’s
early development led it into a high-level equilibrium trap, this was further enhanced by the remarkable
cultural cohesion in China which resulted from a literary canon that included such seminal texts as
11
Confucius’s The Analects, and which were written to inculcate good citizenship and loyalty to the
state. Part IV also outlines how Western perceptions of China have changed from the chinoiserie of the
eighteenth century to the ‘Yellow Peril’ of the nineteenth, and how, now, in the twenty-first century,
attention is once again being focussed on a China that has grown strong by the judicious application of
practices borrowed from the West.
Foucault saw China as being devoted to the ordering of space, and wondered how it was possible
to name, and to speak, and to think using Chinese categories. To do so, it is of course necessary to be
able to speak, to read, and to write Chinese. The Chinese language has more scope for subtlety of ex-
pression than the more concise Western languages. Michel Foucault’s theory that the alphabetic system
changed history is valid because ideas were no longer seen as transcribed in space – sounds were – and
it also led Foucault to explore how a language could become the object of a given period’s knowledge,
which led to this research’s investigations into the Chinese language. What resulted is perhaps the most
important finding in the entire study: the mistransliteration of the word ‘public’ into Chinese as gong,
when it might be more accurate to use the character chang, which means ‘open-air’, instead – especially
when describing the new public spaces of a city like Shanghai.
Finally, Part IV also examines Shanghai’s recent re-emergence as a film location, with works as
diverse as Mission: Impossible III and Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad (this analysis also includes refer-
ence to M. Christine Boyer’s commentary on the latter). The main focus of this section is Kazuo Ishig-
uro’s novel When We Were Orphans which highlights the dangers implicit in overly nostalgic readings
of the city.
It might be nice to end this Introduction with another quote from Francis Bacon: ‘Crafty men
contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but
that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation’. This study of Shanghai, and Chi-
na, has attempted to open a door onto another culture. The Chinese way of looking at the world is exqui-
sitely logical and yet can seem so very alien to us in the West; yet with China such a resurgent culture at
the beginning of the twenty-first century, might it not be a good idea for everyone to try and study it?
12
PART I
SHANGHAI
This is the city at rush hour: All sorts of vehicles and pedestrians, all their invisible desires and count-
less secrets, merge with the flow like rapids plunging through a deep gorge. The sun shines down on the
street, hemmed in on both sides by skyscrapers – the mad creations of humans – towering between sky
and earth. The petty details of daily life are like dust suspended in the air. They are a monotonous theme
of our materialistic age.
Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby
This section looks at Shanghai now, and its place in the global city network. China is resurgent as a
world power, Neil Leach claims that ‘[t]he twentieth century might have been American, but the twenty-
first century will be Chinese’1: and Shanghai is to be its New York City. In fact Shanghai has played this
role in the country since its establishment as a Western colonial enclave in 1842, and today it remains
the most visible manifestation of China’s
links to the global economy. These links
are spectacularly apparent in Pudong, the
new area facing the Bund and located
to the east of the old city centre, (pu-
dong in Chinese literally means ‘east of
the (Huang) Po’). The Bund originally
formed the eastern edge of the foreign
concessions, which were known in Chi-
nese as the Shili Yang Chang (ten miles
of foreign businesses) and was the beat-
ing heart of the colonial city.
At the heart of Pudong sits Luji-
azui, whose name means ‘the village of
the Lu family’. Its new village green, as
it were, is a pretty park, with refurbished
Figure 3. Pudong (source: author photograph) brick godowns2 housing a permanent
exhibition on the history of the area. Sur-
rounded by towering skyscrapers, the headquarters of global corporations and branches of luxury hotels,
this park is beautifully landscaped but invariably empty, as such it is typical of the new public space in
Shanghai: quite dead, even when the weather is good. Of course this park happens to be rather difficult
to get into, ringed as it is by wide and busy roads, but that is not the only problem, Part I outlines why
Shanghai’s new public space is so curiously dead, why it is not so much public space as empty space.
Shanghai is constantly changing and growing. The pace of growth since 1990 (the start of the develop-
ment of the Pudong area) has been staggering, but the city is in fact simply reverting to a pattern that
was seen between 1842 and 1949, when the city experience a century of sustained and startling develop-
ment. Shanghai used to be known as the Dongfang Bali (Paris of the East), and before 1949 it was with-
out doubt Asia’s pre-eminent metropolis. Now, after nearly a half-century behind the ‘bamboo curtain’,
it is once again trying to reposition itself, this time as the New York of Asia.
It could be argued that Shanghai was not a colony at all, at least not in the usual understanding of
that term. It was in fact a self-governing
enclave, perched on the coast of China,
and backed up by British, American,
and French navel power. The city’s most
important area – the International Settle-
ment – governed itself by a Municipal
Council, which was run by prominent
local business people (Westerners all –
Chinese and (initially) Japanese were ex-
cluded from sitting on it). Within decades
of its foundation as a Western enclave
Shanghai had become, according to Stel-
la Dong, ‘…Asia’s greatest metropolis, a
brash sprawling juggernaut of a city that
dominated the rest of the country with
its power, sophistication, and, most of
Figure 4. The Bund (source: author photograph) all, money’1. But as Pamela Yatsko has
so cogently pointed out, ‘[o]ld Shanghai
was a freak of nature – its wildness born
of a unique combination of conditions never to be repeated. These included weak central government
in China; a huge foreign population that did not have to worry about Chinese law; foreign settlements
managed by businessmen of the most laissez-faire mindset; a position as China’s major opium transship-
ment point; and an immigration policy that did not require passports’2.
The city was indeed a strange place, an anomaly, and according to Stella Dong it was ‘[h]alf Ori-
ental, half Occidental; half land, half water; neither a colony nor wholly belonging to China; inhabited
by the citizens of every nation in the world but ruled by none…’3. A city of 3 million people in 1930,
2.85 million of whom were Chinese, yet this vast majority was ruled by a tiny elite of foreigners. The
1930s is also the era most often evoked by Shanghai’s image builders, as it is seen as a shining moment
in the city’s global adventure, an urban legend; it was, however, an insidious model – for all its veneer
of wealth and glamour and sophistication, Shanghai in the 1930s masked a city of gross inequality and
depravity, one where ‘…morality’, according to Dong, ‘[was] as every Shanghai resident knew, [...]
irrelevant’4.
Shanghai was notorious, in fact it is the only city whose name has become a verb for a despica-
ble act: to shanghai. (To shanghai is to ‘“render insensible by drugs or opium, and ship on a vessel want-
ing hands”, [and] dates from the habit of press-ganging sailors. Men, many of whom were found drunk
in “Blood Alley” (off modern-day Jinling Lu), were forced onto ships, which then set sail, leaving the
Postsocialist Shanghai
China’s recent re-emergence as a world power is one of the transformative events of our time, and the
most visible manifestations of the country’s continuing rise can be seen in its two greatest cities: Bei-
jing – particularly the landmark projects built for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games – and in Shanghai
– as the city makes its bid for regional pre-eminence. Since its inception as a colonial enclave in 1842,
Shanghai has been one of the world’s largest, richest, and most important cities. Traditionally it has set
the pace of change in China, and acted as a model for the rest of the country, both as an icon of capital-
ism before 1949 and as a paragon of state-planning after that period. Apart from a brief period of depres-
15 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 9.
16 Cited in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in
Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 104 (italics in original).
17 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 15.
18 It had to wait until 1984 for that coveted status.
19 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 15.
20 Ibid., p. 15.
17
mal for residents. Lack of investment in housing and infrastructure – surely the hardware of any global
metropolis – meant the city had fallen badly behind its regional competitors. As late as 1986, more
than 60% of homes did not have toilets, residents were forced to make use of the time-honoured, though
hardly sanitary, chamber pot21. And although there were 18 times more people using the city’s buses by
the end of the 1980s than in 1949, their number had only increased fourfold22. By 1979, overcrowding
in the city meant that the average Shanghai resident had to make do with 4.3 square metres, and they en-
joyed less than half a square metre of greenery23.
Uncertain whether their policies of market-oriented change would succeed, the Chinese govern-
ment decided to experiment with southern China before letting the country’s pre-eminent metropolis
rejoin the global network. This hesitation has in all likelihood held Shanghai back from joining the first
rank of global cities. While southern China soared, Shanghai foundered. Government-owned enterprises
reacted more slowly to market changes than their non-state competitors in the south. The Shanghai-
nese, who for decades had done little more than meet government-set production targets, had lost their
entrepreneurial edge, and the city’s non-state sector, which was small in any case, was lumbered with a
heavier tax burden than other provinces along China’s coast.
It was not until 18 April 1990 that Shanghai began to compete seriously at a global level. This
was the date that China’s then Premier, Li Peng, announced the decision of the Party Central Committee
and the State Council to develop the Pudong area. A 520-square-kilometre swathe of marshy farmland
between Shanghai and the coast, it was intended to symbolise China’s future role in the global economy,
as well as be the showcase for the next phase of economic reform. Pudong Special Economic Zone rose
like an exhalation across the Huangpo River from the Bund. Formerly a low-density residential, agricul-
tural, and industrial area, today it is home to nearly 6,000 foreign-funded businesses, including the of-
fices of nearly 300 of the Fortune 500 companies (while the Shanghai Puxi side has another 100)24; it is
also home to the Shanghai Stock Exchange, which re-opened in December 1990 and is one of only two
in the country25.
Shanghai Municipality covers just under 350 square kilometres, but the city region covers 6,340
square kilometres, the result of a series of phased expansions since January 1958 when the Shanghai
Municipal Government was authorised by the State Council to establish the City Region, extending its
jurisdiction over three adjacent counties at the same time26. By the end of that year the City Region was
further extended to include seven neighbouring counties27. The difficulty of making a global financial
hub in the over-crowded streets and alleyways of Puxi made Pudong a more logical choice for the city’s
urban expansion. The Chinese government invested more than $12 billion28 in infrastructure projects
just to prepare Pudong for construction29, after all the area is a marsh. In fact, seven times more was
invested in Shanghai between 1992 and 1997 than during the whole of the 1980s30. More than 1,300
kilometres of roads have been built, including a 27-kilometre ring road which shot up in just two years;
Shanghai opened its first subway line in 1995; and broke ground in 1997 for the new Pudong Airport,
which opened for business in 199931. Shanghai is home also to the world’s fastest train, a Maglev (mag-
21 Ibid., p. 16.
22 Ibid., pp. 16-17.
23 Ibid., p. 16.
24 Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 30.
25 The other is in Shenzhen.
26 Rebecca L.H. Chiu, China’s Rapid Urbanisation: Is Compact Shanghai Sustainable? A Preliminary
Study.
27 Ibid.
28 Whenever the figure one billion is mentioned it is to be understood as American usage, i.e. 19 and not the
European 112; in Europe, 19 is known as a ‘milliard’.
29 Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 31.
30 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 26.
31 Ibid., p. 27.
18
netic levitation) line that links suburban Shanghai to the new Pudong Airport, and the city has built more
than five thousand new buildings over fifteen storeys tall by 200432.
The special economic zones are China’s visible and practical attempts to open up to the outside
world. Apart from Pudong and Shenzhen, there are Da Bei, adjacent to Dalian in the north, and Hainan,
in the south of the country. New infrastructure was provided, along with manufacturing and warehouse
facilities within these zones, which are modelled somewhat along the same lines as Singapore, South
Korea, and Taiwan’s earlier and successful efforts to attract foreign direct investment. Pudong is further
divided into a number of smaller zones, including the Jinqiao Export Processing Zone, the Waigaoqiao
Free Trade Zone, and the Lujiazui Financial District. Lujiazui is a financial and trade development zone
and is where the city’s stock market re-opened as well as being the base for foreign exchange and inter-
bank markets.
Like Shenzhen to the south, incentives were implemented here to attract foreign investment and
to enable Shanghai to fuel development in the provinces further inland along the Yangtze. Part of this
fuelling is facilitated by major international projects. The forthcoming Shanghai Expo in 2010 is part of
such efforts, as are the construction of landmark towers for the city. Skidmore, Owing and Merrill’s Jin
Mao Tower is 420 metres high and used to be China’s tallest building, it has just been overshadowed by
Kohn Pedersohn Fox’s neighbouring World Finance Centre, which just topped out at 468 metres. Shang-
hai is now home to more skyscrapers than Manhattan, and they are not just to be found in Pudong, they
have mushroomed all over the city. According to the Pudong New Area Municipal Administrative Com-
mittee, more than 180 high-rises dominated the skyline by 199933, and one-fifth of the world’s construc-
tion cranes were in use at one point during that decade34. Shanghai had about 270,000 square metres of
high-grade office space in 1995, but this was expected to grow to 3.24 million square metres by 2000.
By comparison, it took Hong Kong 35 years to build the equivalent amount35. The city now supplies
over 12% of the municipal revenue of China as well as handling more than 25% of the total trade of all
of China’s ports. In 2005 Shanghai’s Gross Domestic Product reached US$7,683 per capita (of regis-
tered population), despite a very large population base. This is over four times the average of the United
States itself (which is $1,750)36.
As the nation’s pre-eminent commercial and industrial metropolis, most of Shanghai’s recent and
rapid population growth has been the result of migration. The city’s official population reached 17.78
million in 2005 (77% of whom were registered residents)37. But it has to asked if the provision of so
much office space is not a little misguided? It is perhaps somewhat reminiscent of the Chinese mania
for producing steel during the Great Leap Forward (1958-60). At that time steel production was seen as
a useful index of a country’s economic prowess, Chairman Mao’s error seems to have been to mistake
this index for something that could be an end in itself. Taken simply as an index of a nation’s economic
growth, steel production was a useful indicator, just like railways had been a century earlier. While not
suggesting this overproduction of office space is anything like what happened during the disastrous
Great Leap Forward (when people, eager to boost their villages’ steel quotas melted down pots and
pans), it might be valid, however, to ask what is happening with all of this new space that is being cre-
ated? And, perhaps even more importantly, what is life like for the people who inhabit it on a daily ba-
sis, as well as the people who have been forced to make way for it all? As the Odyssey Illustrated Guide
Shanghai as home
Shanghai is one of the world’s most densely populated cities, and despite efforts to decentralise the pop-
ulation via a massive program of satellite towns the city centre is still the most densely populated area,
at least according to Rebecca L.H. Chiu46. While the city’s average density is supposedly lower than
most of Asia’s premier metropolises (for example, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, and Tokyo), at ap-
proximately 13,400 people per square kilometre in urban areas it actually surpasses all of these cities
except Hong Kong47. As Chiu astutely points out, overcrowded living environment, lack of green space,
reduced domestic living space, poorer health resulting from air pollution, as well as reduced housing af-
48 Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong
Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 101.
49 A 1997 study on urban transportation in Shanghai, cited in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between
Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, pp. 111-112.
50 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 10.
51 Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 72.
52 Ibid., p. 72.
53 Ibid., p. 90.
54 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 9.
21
cess to accurate information, and market-oriented corporate incentives’55.
It might be useful to end this chapter by reiterating the social conflict between the different
groups of city users, as highlighted by Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, and reiterate the primary concern of
this thesis: the spaces they call home.
55 Ibid., p. 12.
22
2 THE GLOBAL CITY NETWORK
‘Over the centuries,’ Saskia Sassen writes, ‘cities have been at the cross-roads of major, often worldwide
processes. What is different today is the intensity, complexity and global span of these networks, the ex-
tent to which significant portions of economies are now dematerialized and digitalized and hence the ex-
tent to which they can travel at great speeds through some of these networks, and, thirdly, the numbers
of cities that are part of cross-border networks operating at vast geographic scales’1. What this means is
that cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore constitute a system rather than simply competing
with each other; markets are integrated in order to maximise growth in all centres. According to David
R. Meyer, ‘[a] crisis in Tokyo or Hong Kong does not create advantages for other centers… there is little
to gain for the larger financial system in Hong Kong’s or Tokyo’s decline’2.
In examining Hong Kong’s role as a strategic node for capital exchange between China and the
rest of the world, Meyer highlights the extent to which it is social connectivity that has produced this
strategic role, he also points out that intermediaries build transactions on trust in order to minimise risks
of exchange across international boundaries; this they do through friendship, family, ethnic, or religious
ties. Intermediaries require face-to-face exchange to acquire information from one another, to develop
strategies, and to acquire trustworthy partners. Control rests in the social networks of capital that meet
in Hong Kong, and these networks are rooted in long-standing relationships and bonds of trust linking
firms locally, throughout Asia, and across the globe.
7 Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 20.
8 Quoted in Jane Jacobs’s Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 24.
9 Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 22.
10 Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. 25, footnote 1.
11 Ibid., p. 84.
12 Ibid., p. 33.
13 Ibid., p. 19.
24
can derive from such systems14. This effectively creates barriers to less-developed economies. The man-
agement of the complex interaction between massive concentrations of material resources that informa-
tion technologies allow have reconfigured the interaction between capital fixity and hypermobility, they
have also, and more importantly, given cities that were already major global players a new competitive
advantage; this is perhaps the most important point in Sassen’s The Global City, and is one which she
develops, albeit more through the writings of others, in the follow-on publication, Global Networks,
Linked Cities, which she edited.
Information technology has turned producer services into tradable goods, but the cities that are
home to these new and increasingly mobile services are less important as nodal points for the co-ordina-
tion of global processes, they have become (once again) sites of production in their own right. But what
is it they are producing? Not steel or cotton: they are producing information.
Saskia Sassen identifies two kinds of ‘information’: the first is what she calls ‘the datum’, and is
relatively straightforward, in that it is standardised and easily available (Sassen gives the example of the
details of a privatisation in another country); the second kind is far more difficult to obtain because it is
non-standardised and requires interpretation and evaluation; which in turn requires judgement (invari-
ably that of an expert). When this interpretation becomes what Sassen calls ‘authoritative’ it has become
‘information’ and is then available to all.
To give an analogy: this is not unlike looking something up on the Internet; there is a lot of data
out there – not all of it accurate – and what a researcher needs to do is compare this data against what
they know, to see if it can tell them anything new and useful, i.e. if it can become information. This
process of course requires knowledge in the first place, as well as judgement, and (very often) patience;
as Sassen puts it, ‘[i]t [this process] entails negotiating a series of datums [sic] and a series of interpreta-
tions of a mix of datums [sic] in the hope of producing a higher order type of information’, and as she
correctly points out, ‘[a]ccess to the first kind of information is now global and immediate thanks to the
digital revolution. But it is the second type of information that requires a complicated mixture of ele-
ments, not only technical but also social’15. Her point is that the technical infrastructure required for con-
nectivity can be reproduced anywhere (at least in principle), but its social connectivity cannot.
This ties in to what Manuel Castells calls ‘informationalism’, which he defines as the ‘…mode
of development in which the main source of productivity is the qualitative capacity to optimize the
combination and use of factors of production on the basis of knowledge and information’, as opposed to
‘industrialism’, where the main sources of productivity are ‘…the quantitative increase of factors of pro-
duction (labor, capital, and natural resources), together with the use of new sources of energy’16. Accord-
ing to Castells, ‘[t]he rise of informationalism is inseparable from a new social structure, the network
society’17. Castells’s notion of the network society is one we shall be turning to shortly, first it might be
useful to finish off this brief survey of Saskia Sassen’s work by pointing out that she too has touched
upon the notion of the network society in her own work on global cities – so observant a commentator
could scarcely have done otherwise. Sassen states quite unequivocally (hence linking her own work to
that of Castells) that ‘…the global city is not a place but a network’18; an idea she goes on to develop in
Global Networks, Linked Cities.
Capital can flow out of a city quite as easily and quickly as it flows in; and what was once
thought of as ‘national’ capital can now just as easily join the exodus19. But as Sassen is at pains to point
out in The Global City, there is little to gain for the larger financial system if one or more cities in it suf-
fer a decline. What she terms the ‘geography of globalisation’ is not a planetary event, it is a changing
14 Ibid., p. 120.
15 Ibid., p. 120.
16 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 8.
17 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 8, (also dealt with in Chapter 1
of The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age, Volume I).
18 Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. 349.
19 Saskia Sassen, ed., Global Networks, Linked Cities, p. 129.
25
geography, and ‘…one that has undergone multiple, often specialized transformations over the last few
centuries and over the last two decades, and most recently has come to include electronic space’20. Some
places have been left out of these transformation processes – both Sassen and Castells highlight the
lamentable dearth of telephones in sub-Saharan Africa (where there are fewer than in Manhattan). There
is a vast region of the world that lies unconnected to any but the most peripheral fringes of the global
economy, and while many factors have been used to explain why these places lack development: corrupt
governments, internecine strife, lack of investment in infrastructure, even of the most basic roads-and-
bridges type, etc., Jane Jacobs’s highlighting of the stunning success of Pacific-Rim economies seems
to give the lie to this, as some of these economies have suffered similar problems and yet have managed
to achieve success. Of course, as Jacobs also points out: ‘…success has turned out to be as puzzling as
failure because any measures, policies or combinations of them that are conventionally singled out as
responsible for these successes can only too readily be matched by equivalent measures and policies fol-
lowed only by failures somewhere else’21. It is this region of unconnectedness that will be referred to in
this thesis as the ‘analogue archipelago’22.
Michel Foucault also famously made use of the term ‘archipelago’, admittedly only once, to des-
ignate ‘…via the title of Solzhenitsyn’s work, the carceral archipelago: the way in which a form of
punitive system is physically dispersed yet at the same time covers the entirety of a society’23. It is an
understanding similar to Foucault’s that is designated here, the term ‘analogue archipelago’ is intended
to describe those who find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide. Economists, and others,
in trying to explain this uneven development, sometimes fall back on cultural platitudes: Japanese are
hard-working and intelligent; Chinese are good traders, etc., but as Jane Jacobs witheringly puts it: ‘For
enlightenment of this quality [or lack thereof] we don’t need economics or economists. Perceptive tour-
ists do quite as well’24.
Perhaps Singapore points us in the right direction, where we saw earlier their clever use of ‘for-
eign talent’. The Singapore authorities understand that it is people who drive an economy, talented,
hard-working people, whether Japanese or Chinese, Caucasian or African. People who are good at what
they do, and who are prepared to do it wherever they feel most appreciated (i.e. invariably wherever
they earn the best remuneration); this goes to the heart of what attracts foreign talent. What keeps them
in a city, however, can depend on other, less tangible attractions than simply a large paycheque. How
pleasant is the city to live in? How easy is it to get around? What are the restaurants and galleries like?
What is the standard of schooling? Is there access to nature (other than the ubiquitous golf course)? Is
the city polluted? These are issues that have been highlighted by Pamela Yatsko in New Shanghai: The
Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City and to which we shall be returning later in this chapter, but for
the moment it is probably enough to point out that there are many, sometimes quite intangible, reasons
why people to move to, and then stay in, any given city, global or otherwise.
The effects globalisation has on a city contribute to an urban spatiality that often massively
transforms certain portions of it. Where the focus in a city is on the architecture of networks there is
invariably a tension between what Saskia Sassen calls global span and particular sites. In Global Net-
works, Linked Cities these tensions are explored by a number of different researchers who examine the
global architecture of these networks, as well as the interactions they have had with specific environ-
ments in different cities. David R. Meyer’s ‘Hong Kong: Global Capital Exchange’ examines the role
20 Ibid., p. 10.
21 Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 6. Ironically, economies
in sub-Saharan Africa grew by more than 5 per cent in 2005, their best economic performance for three decades,
according to David Smith in The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order (pp. 125-126)
this, significantly, was not due to development aid from the West but thanks to investment from China.
22 The term ‘analogue archipelago’ is inspired by the novel, Killing Time, by Caleb Carr.
23 Michel Foucault, ‘Questions on Geography’ from Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings 1972-1977, Colin Gordon, ed., p. 68.
24 Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 6.
26
that that city plays as a strategic node for capital exchange between China and the world. He points to
Hong Kong’s extraordinary social connectivity as a factor in producing and maintaining its strategic
role. Meyer dismisses any fears that advances in telecommunications may disperse these key actors in
finance, commodity exchange, corporate management, and other businesses, from their metropolitan
base – not unlike the much-heralded ‘paperless office’ which singularly failed to materialise once the
new information age settled in.
Ironically it is the need to control and co-ordinate these increasingly complicated exchanges that
has led to an increase in the need for face-to-face communication. Intermediaries, according to Meyer,
need relationships to be built on trust, particularly if they are across international boundaries, and this
they do, at least in the case of Hong Kong (as we have just seen) through friendship, family, ethnic, and/
or religious ties. This is one aspect of the Chinese way of doing business, based on mutual trust, and it
is one we will be seeing again in this thesis when we look at the history of colonial Shanghai, where the
city’s business intermediaries formed their own powerful and distinct social group known as ‘compra-
dors’. Hong Kong, because it acted, according to Meyer, as a leading embarkation point for the Chinese
going abroad, found its business community could more effectively monitor changes in the wider Chi-
nese diaspora.
Modern telecommunications, while permitting instantaneous communication of vast amounts of
information, has not created a network system where none existed before. These nodal points in the net-
work of global cities have formed themselves in place where people had already established networks.
Hong Kong now operates the largest teleport in Asia, according to Meyer, and ‘[i]t has the greatest array
of fibre-optic international cables of any metropolis in Asia; numerous submarine cable systems link it
with Asia, Oceania, North America, and Europe, and its satellite contacts permit global reach’25. But, as
Saskia Sassen points out, the historical reasons for this is that fibre systems are not easily spliced (hence
less able to connect multiple lateral sites), so these systems tend to be installed along existing rights of
way, such as rail, waterways, and/or roads – what Niall Ferguson would call ‘the sinews of Western im-
perial power’26.
A good example of this might be Bangalore in India. A globally connected city, known as India’s
‘Silicon Valley’, it is a place that has built its global connectedness on a colonial past. Developed by the
British in the 1920s as a Garden City with railways, telegraph, and postal links, it was the first place in
the country to have electricity. In the 1980s it was still a quiet settlement with a relatively small popula-
tion (for India) of 3 million, now an important ICT centre, its population has grown to 6.5 million27. It
is these older and erstwhile imperial networks that have underscored the success of key cities in Asia’s
tiger economies, which can be seen as their inheritors. But we must never forget that it is people who
makes these places and their networks actually operate, and it is people who are the main reason they
come into being in the first place, something David R. Meyer zealously points out in his article: ‘…con-
struction and improvements of telematics cannot substitute for social networks’28.
As Saskia Sassen says, ‘[b]eing in a city becomes synonymous with being in an extremely in-
tense and dense information loop’29, because people’s talent and expertise in various specialised fields
makes certain types of urban environments function as information centres, and this is something that
still cannot be replicated in cyberspace. Sassen also points out that being in such a city has one other
remarkable value-added feature, and that is that unplanned, indeed unforeseeable, mixes of information,
expertise, and talent take places in these cities, something Sassen sees as being key in producing what
25 David R. Meyer, ‘Hong Kong: Global Capital Exchange’ in Global Networks, Linked Cities, Saskia
Sassen, ed., p. 264.
26 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 15.
27 David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 139.
28 David R. Meyer, ‘Hong Kong: Global Capital Exchange’ in Global Networks, Linked Cities, Saskia Sas-
sen, ed., p. 268.
29 Saskia Sassen, The Global City, p. xx.
27
she calls ‘a higher order of information’30.
30 Ibid., p. xx.
31 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 381.
32 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. 304, footnote 4.
33 Ibid., p. 305, footnote 4.
34 Ibid., p. 304, footnote 4.
35 Ibid., p. xvi.
36 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 380 (italics in original).
37 Ibid., p. 371.
38 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. xvii.
39 Ibid., p. 342.
28
With the exception of a small elite of globopolitans (half beings, half flows), people all over the
world resent the loss of control over their lives, over their environment, over their jobs, over
their economies, over their governments, over their countries, and, ultimately, over the fate
of the Earth. Thus, following an old law of social evolution, resistance confronts domination,
empowerment reacts against powerlessness, and alternative projects challenge the logic
embedded in the new global order, increasingly sensed as disorder by people around the planet.40
This is something that ties in to Saskia Sassen’s work, which we will see again in a moment,
but Castells states in End of Millennium (Volume III of The Information Age) that ‘[s]ocial exclusion
is often expressed in spatial terms. The territorial confinement of systemically worthless populations,
disconnected from networks of valuable functions and people, is indeed a major characteristic of the
spatial logic of the network society’41. He has also brought this to our attention earlier in the trilogy
(in chapter 6 of Volume I, The Information Age), but in Volume III, End of Millennium, he see global
capitalism as having a global reach; it is ‘a new brand of leaner, meaner capitalism’, one that no
longer has to face competition from Soviet or Chinese-style communism, the former having imploded
in the early 1990s, and the latter having in effect embraced capitalism under the rubric of ‘Chinese
characteristics’ – a development which will also be explored later on in Part I.
52 Ibid., p. 98.
53 K. Anthony Appiah, ‘Foreword’ in Globalization and its Discontents, Saskia Sassen, ed., p. XII.
54 David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 99 (italics in original).
55 Ibid., pp. 99-100.
56 Ibid., p. 103.
57 K. Anthony Appiah, ‘Foreword’ in Globalization and its Discontents, Saskia Sassen, ed., p. XII.
58 David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 105.
59 Ibid., p. 113.
60 Saskia Sassen, ed., Globalization and its Discontents, p. XXVI.
31
lot of money, they are not wealthy, a subtle distinction Sassen draws our attention to when she highlights
the fact that these new global elites actually have ‘no significant control or ownership in the large cor-
poration and investment banks for which they work’61; their earned income, while significant, is actually
too little to be investment capital, hence the emergence of the spending habits of this new class, a class
that is not interested in mere food anymore but cuisine, not in mere clothing but designer labels, and not
in decoration but in objets d’art62.
75 Ibid., p. 238.
76 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 16.
77 Ibid., p. 16.
78 Ibid., p. lx.
79 Ibid., p. 16.
80 Ibid., p. 16.
81 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 238.
82 Ibid., p. 299.
34
the product of ‘three centuries of commerce, conquest and colonization’83, and they represented a really
remarkable global division of labour. Ferguson also recognises that at the heart of imperialism lay a few
great cities84. John Darwin has pointed out the importance of building in these cities when he states that:
The outward sign of commercial success was the rapid construction of customs houses, railways
stations, banks and hotels, as well as lavish clubs and residences for the new merchant class.
Bombay railway station, the Raffles’ [sic] Hotel in Singapore, the ‘Parisian’ splendour of the new
Buenos Aires, Cape Town’s Standard Bank (where Rhodes had his account), the Shanghai Bund,
Collins Street in Melbourne and the exuberant architecture of Sydney’s leading banks (around
Martin Place) showed the confidence and prosperity of this commercial world85.
This is also a point which Brenda S.A. Yeoh highlights in her own analysis of the contested spaces of
colonial Singapore, which we will see at the end of Part II.
The Europeans’ desire to impress using the built environment reflects what John Darwin calls
the projection of ‘a cultural hierarchy of astonishing force and pervasive influence’86. Even though the
buildings, and the cities that housed them, were often undeniably elegantly planned, what they were
asserting was the simple fact of a Western cultural primacy. This architectural elegance must not be al-
lowed to distract the reader because it must be remembered that its assertion was nothing if not aggres-
sive. In fact it could be posited that these buildings can be seen as an index (not unlike the mid-twentieth
century’s index of steel production as an indicator of economic growth), and that what they represented
was something that John Darwin sees as ‘[t]he sheer scale of Europe’s physical predominance after
1880 across Asia, Africa and the Pacific…’87. This was Europe’s
[C]ultural influence [which] was disseminated more widely and authoritatively than in ear-
lier times. European categories of thought, forms of scientific inquiry, interpretations of the past,
ideas of social order, models of public morality, concepts of crime and justice, and modes of
literary expression, as well as European recipes for health, notions of leisure, and even styles of
dress, became the civilized ‘standard’ against which other cultures were measured and usually
found wanting88.
It was this confidence in what Darwin calls ‘their unique command of progress’ that goes some
way towards explaining this arrogance89. Something that Edward W. Said also draws our attention to,
with his notion of the European construction of an Oriental ‘Other’. Darwin also refers to this Ori-
ent, but without actually referring to Said, as being ‘…sunk in the quagmires of moral and intellectual
“backwardness”’90, something Darwin sees as being somehow essential to Europeans’ progressive self-
image. Said’s work is also something that shall be examined in detail in Part III, but for the moment it
is enough to point out that Darwin’s statement that it was ‘[o]nly by insisting on the failings of the “Ori-
ent” (in practice all non-Western peoples) could the Europeans be sure of their own progressive identi-
ty’91 is an accurate one.
The reader will notice that Darwin, at least until this last quotation, has invariably made use of
the terms ‘European’ and ‘Europe’ in his work; in order to quote him as accurately as possible these
92 Ibid., p. 340.
93 Ibid., p. 341.
94 Ibid., p. 348.
95 Ibid., p. 348.
96 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi-
ronment, p. 8.
97 Ibid., p. 8.
98 Gregory Bracken, The Interface of Empire, International Forum on Urbanism, Tsinghua University, Bei-
jing, October, 2006.
36
Historical Introduction). And, as has already been mentioned, this study of Shanghai has incorporated
Hong Kong and Singapore because of these three cities’ shared British colonial history – which links
colonial networks to global cities – but there is another interesting and potentially even more useful con-
nection between them, one that has been highlighted convincingly by Peter G. Rowe: their shared neo-
Confucian heritage99.
According to Brenda S.A. Yeoh, colonial authorities structured their urban environments in order
to facilitate colonial rule as well as express colonial aspirations and ideals. This they did through the
formation of municipal authorities and other institutions of local urban governance. The colonial city
was seen as an ideal, one that was intended to reflect the power and prestige of the colonists. These cit-
ies were intended to be ‘…ordered, sanitized, and amenable to regulation, and structured to enhance the
flow of economic activities such as trade and communications which were crucial to the entire colonial
economy’100. This probably also explains why the neoclassical style was so popular for colonial public
buildings; Gothic Revival architecture, all the rage in the United Kingdom in the late-nineteenth century,
never became widespread in its colonies, except for some churches. The neoclassical style, apart from
hinting at the all-important link to ancient Greece and Rome, which we will see again in Part II, also
presented a neat and orderly façade to those being colonised.
This methodology can once again be discerned in the global city network’s generic skyscrapers,
which are often seen as expressing a city’s global credentials. According to Yeoh, ‘[c]olonial investment
and expenditure tended to favour the construction of dendritic communication systems linking the hin-
terland to colonial cities to expedite the channelling of commodities to the metropolitan core; financial,
banking, insurance, and warehousing complexes proliferated to facilitate entrepot trade, whilst the per-
sistence of slums, squatters, and tenements testified to the neglect of housing and welfare facilities in the
colonial city’101. So there was a downside to all of this idealised planning, another pattern that seems to
be repeating itself – albeit in a slightly different way – in the global city. Some groups found (and still
find) themselves marginalised in this rush to market, their homes and lives swept away in the eagerness
to make these cities places where international elites, colonial or contemporary, will want to settle. What
is happening to these marginalised people in Shanghai is one of the most important parts of this entire
investigation, and will be examined in detail later in Part I, first we will return to Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s co-
gent analysis of what happened to such groups in Singapore during the colonial era (i.e. 1819 to c.1965).
Yeoh identifies three features intrinsic to colonial cities: firstly, racial, cultural, social and re-
ligious pluralism; secondly, a new class system which neither resembles industrial nor pre-industrial
cities; and thirdly, the fact that social, economic, and political power is concentrated in the hands of the
colonisers (who often tend to be a racially distinct group)102. The colonial city is often seen as sitting
somewhere between traditionalism and modernisation. In the perception of a linear series of stages that
lead to the form and function of a modern Western-style city, Yeoh sees the colonial city as articulat-
ing the transition from one to the other, containing as it does ‘modern’ spaces, such as the commercial
centre, the port, and the upmarket residential districts; as well as the native bazaars and sacred places,
which exist as the remnants of the pre-colonial era. This pattern reflects what Yeoh calls ‘a dual eco-
nomic structure - an upper circuit or “firm-centred” economy characterized by Western capitalistic
forms such as banks and trading firms, and a lower circuit or “bazaar” economy with pre-industrial and
semi-capitalistic forms of economic organization such as Chinese loan associations and mobile street
markets’. In Yeoh’s view, this dual economic structure is the ‘“basic determinant’ of urban landuse pat-
terns’ in colonial cities such as Singapore103.
Yeoh then identifies a second approach in trying to understand the built form of colonial cities,
104 Ibid., p. 5.
105 Cited in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban
Built Environment, p. 6 (ellipses in original).
106 Ibid., p. 6.
107 Terence G. McGee, quoted in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Rela-
tions and the Urban Built Environment, p. 3.
108 Michael Peter Smith and Richard Tardanico, cited in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial
Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment, p. 10.
109 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, pp. 7, 14, etc.
38
is perhaps most interesting about Abbas’s analysis is the fact that, like Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Abbas has
also made use of Anthony King’s work, in this case the argument that there is a connection between
the colonial city and the global one. Abbas points out that colonialism itself pioneered the methods re-
quired to incorporate these pre-capitalist, pre-industrial, non-European societies into the world economy
and established the ways of dealing with ethnically, racially, and culturally different societies. He cites
Anthony King as stating that the surprising consequence of this ‘historically significant phenomenon’
is that ‘colonial cities can be viewed as the forerunners of what the contemporary capitalist world city
would eventually become’110.
Ackbar Abbas also suggests that one of the implications of this argument is that it was colonial-
ism that allowed imperialism to make the leap into globalism. While the broad thrust of this argument
is sound, this research would perhaps couch its terms somewhat differently, beginning with some clear
definitions of what constituted ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ (which shall be undertaken in Part II); for
the moment it is probably enough to look to Abbas as he tells us that ‘the colonial city can also prefigure
the global city. The rise of globalism spells the end of the old empires, but not before the offspring of
these empires, the previous colonial cities, have been primed to perform well as global cities’111.
One other profoundly important point made by Abbas is that Hong Kong’s ‘one country,
two systems’ formula – the one invariably used to describe the former British colony’s somewhat anom-
alous situation within Communist China (it is a Special Administrative Region, and will remain so until
2047) – is that the city’s built form speaks less of one country, two systems, and rather more of ‘one
system’ (i.e. that of international capital) at ‘different stages of development’112, something that will be
interesting to watch as capitalism takes on ‘Chinese characteristics’.
Finally, we turn our attention to Shanghai. The whole point of exploring what happened to Hong
Kong and Singapore in the colonial era is to cast some light on Shanghai’s own colonial experience,
the better to understand what is going on in the city today. The reason for this is to examine the trajec-
tory these three colonial cites have been following as they turn themselves into global cities. Before
examining the physical effects this has had on the city, it might be useful to turn our attention to Mi-
chelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong
Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, a book which also explores some of the themes that are being explored in
this research. Huang’s book cites both Saskia Sassen’s network of the ‘new geography of centrality and
marginality’ and David Harvey’s ‘time-space compression’. The former, in her effort to ‘understand the
global city as a dual city with the intensification of two classes – the new elite or the international busi-
ness people and the low income “others”’, which is facilitated by the latter’s time-space compression as
being the advancement of technology that facilitates logistics to assure the fast return of profit113.
Huang’s understanding of the notion of the global city is premised on Sassen’s, which she says
‘represents a strategic space where global processes materialize in national territories and global dy-
namics use national institutional arrangements’114. Huang and Sassen both see global cities as those
which function as international business and financial centres and which ‘…are sites for direct transac-
tions with world markets that take place without government inspection’115. Huang also astutely identi-
fies Sassen’s ‘dual city model’ as pointing towards ‘the concealed spatiality, the uneven development the
global city that is often glossed over by government officials, urban planners, or multinational corpora-
110 Anthony King, quoted in Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 3
(italics in original).
111 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 3.
112 Ibid., p. 6.
113 Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong
Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 5.
114 Saskia Sassen, cited in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of
Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 5.
115 Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong
Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 5.
39
tions as “our shared future”, a prosperous space of hope for every inhabitant regardless of their gender,
class, or ethnic identity’116.
Huang points to Shanghai’s frenzied urban redevelopment in the 1990s, which she sees as dem-
onstrating ‘how global capital changes the landscape of the city. The cluster of dazzling skyscrapers in
Pudong and the newly constructed buildings everywhere in the whole city account for the disappearance
of the traditional alley houses and relocation, voluntary or not, a shared experience for the majority of
Shanghainese’117. This globalisation brings about quite specific spatial forms in the city but also results
in a new social structure, where she laments that ‘…the open space embodied by the global city for the
capital accumulation is paradoxically confining and oppressive for many of the city-users’118.
Huang also cites Sassen as saying that this new urban geography is a place where ‘unbridgeable
differences’ arise between different types of city user, on the one hand the small number of ‘interna-
tional business people (the new elite)’ and on the other, a much larger population of ‘low-income “oth-
ers” (the underprivileged)’119. This is what she scathingly refers to as ‘[t]he invading power of global
capital’ as it imprints itself indelibly on the urban landscape120. Ultimately, this is what this study of
Shanghai is all about: the frenzied pace of redevelopment as the city tries to turn itself into a node in the
global network, and also, and even more importantly, what effect this move is having on the city’s new
public spaces, as well as on the lives of the ‘new elite’ who are supposed to be making use of them, not
to mention the ‘low-income “others”’ who are being pushed aside to make way for them.
116 Ibid., p. 6.
117 Ibid., p. 6.
118 Ibid., p. 11.
119 Ibid., p. 17.
120 Ibid., p. 19.
40
3 CHINA RESURGENT
In the nineteenth century, the label ‘Made in Britain’ reflected that country’s industrial and imperial
might; the twentieth century saw goods with the logo ‘Made in USA’, again a reflection of industrial
power and expertise. Increasingly we are now seeing the label ‘Made in China’; are we about to see a
‘Chinese Century’? as some commentators would have us believe. China now has the world’s fourth
largest economy, the result of just under 10 percent growth per annum for the best part of three decades.
As a country it now surpasses Japan in terms of international trade, making it third behind the United
States and Germany. China is second only to the United States as a recipient of foreign direct investment
(FDI), and because the country is so large, and its economy growing so rapidly, it has been said to ac-
count for some 12 percent of all growth in world trade in recent years. China has been called the world’s
workshop, not because it is home to the world’s cheapest workforce (Southeast Asian and African work-
ers get paid less), but because it sits in a relatively stable part of the globe and offers reliable and ca-
pable workers kept in line by government-enforced discipline.
A number of countries in the early stages of economic reform have experienced rapid growth,
but nothing has ever come close to the speed achieved by China in recent years. According to Ted C.
Fishman, the country’s economy has doubled nearly three times over in the last thirty years1. This im-
pressive rate is all the more remarkable for having been achieved not by right-wing capitalists but what
Niall Ferguson calls ‘card-carrying Communists’2. Indeed, Ferguson points out that ‘the man responsible
for China’s economic miracle was the same man who ordered the tanks into Tiananmen Square’3.
What has been happening in China is in stark contrast to Eastern Europe, where the Soviet
leadership tried to introduce economic reform and ended up with a revolution and economic collapse.
The Chinese wanted, and got, economic reconstruction without political reform. How were they able to
do this? Ferguson maintains the answer is simple: when a potentially revolutionary situation developed
in 1989, the regime did what Communist regimes have routinely done when confronted with internal
dissent, they sent in the tanks: on 4 June 1989 the Democracy Wall movement was ruthlessly sup-
pressed.
This answer is perhaps too simple. The Chinese authorities may have suppressed dissent, even
brutally so, but they have also managed to lift more people out of poverty in the last thirty years than
any other regime in history, communist or capitalist. Hundreds of millions of people have seen their
lives vastly improved thanks to China’s agricultural and economic reforms. China’s rise as a global
economic and political power is seen by the Institute for International Economics and the Centre for
Strategic and International Studies as being ‘one of the transformative events of our time’4. Yet what are
other world powers making of this transformation? According to the IIEC and CSIS, ‘[s]ome devotees
of realpolitik [sic] will fear that China’s size and growing military capabilities will produce a new stra-
tegic threat to the United States and its allies while other observers see a strong and more self-confident
China as a likely force for stability in the region and the world’5. Ted C. Fishman quotes Tom Saler, a
financial journalist for the Milwakee Journal Sentinel, in saying that ‘twenty-one recessions, a depres-
sion, two stock-market crashes, and two world wars were not about to stop the American economy from
growing over the last century from $118 billion ($367 billion in 2000 dollars) to over $10 trillion. In
constant dollars, that is a twenty-seven-fold increase’6. China, by all appearances, seems poised for simi-
lar growth in this century.
Along with this growth comes new-found power, Beijing is now calling for the creation of a
East Asia
China has once again begun to dominate Asia, it is becoming a regional hegemon garnering increas-
ing global influence. One significant factor in China’s remarkable economic growth in recent years
has been rapid and massive urbanisation. As such it is fast catching up with the rest of the East-Asian
region where urban development has long been impressive. Peter G. Rowe lists five of the world’s top
ten fastest growing cities in the world as being in Asia, with eight of the top twenty, by size of popula-
tion, located here, and six of the top ten most densely populated, (Hong Kong takes the lead with 28,405
people per square kilometre and with spot densities of up to 2,500 people per hectare)10. In the last three
decades, the region Manuel Castells refers to as the Asia Pacific, has become ‘the major center of capi-
tal accumulation in the planet, the largest manufacturing producer, the most competitive trading region,
one of the two leading centers of information technology innovation and production (the other was the
US), and the fastest growing market’11. China’s recent rise, seen alongside Japan’s long-standing tech-
nological and financial might, seems to be ushering in ‘a geo-economic tectonic shift’, establishing a
new Pacific connection to the global economy and with it the ‘Pacific Era’12. Given that China and Japan
have never been strong at the same time, and that China still feels considerable bitterness towards Japan
over its aggression in the twentieth century, it remains to be seen how ‘pacific’ this era will actually be.
One seemingly inevitable outcome of industrialisation, at least according to Peter G. Rowe, is
urbanisation: workers tend to migrate to be close to centres of manufacturing13. It could just as easily
be argued that industrialisation was a product or urbanisation, though the more balanced view might be
that they enjoy a symbiotic relationship, i.e. one would not happen without the other. Rowe, in his ex-
amination of East-Asian cities, poses the question of how well do cities in this region conform of mod-
ernisation as it is understood elsewhere in the world, particularly the West? And to what extent does it
describe a regional modernity that is ‘…different in kind, as well as degree, from other modern cities?’14
He then rather cleverly answers this by equating any understanding of these views as being a question
of perspective. Modernisation, in Rowe’s view, is ‘commonly understood through an ensemble of inter-
related characteristics. Chief among them is industrialisation, or the conversion of raw materials into
marketable manufactured products and sources of power and propulsion, along with tertiary functions
to deal with the mass distribution and information transactions involved’15. In other words, it was often
defined by a combination of processes: including ‘industrialization, urbanization, labour diversification,
social mobility and, as a result, substantially improved material standards of living’16.
This, according to Rowe, invariably brought with it ‘the rule of law, social pluralism and a reli-
ance on representative bodies for governance’17 – all factors we have already seen in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s
analysis of Singapore, where she showed them to be essential for the good governance of a colonial city,
[T]he globalization of capital and commissions, as well as the presence of multinational corpora-
tions[…], has increased the number of designers from one place producing projects somewhere
else. Many well-known and sizeable American and European architectural firms now have
projects and branch offices overseas, including East Asia. Constant information sharing, over
the Internet, or through internationally circulating design magazines and professional journals,
together with the widespread adoptions of Western building practices, almost ensures that any
tendency towards parochialism is quickly overcome.20
While this thesis is convincing, there is a downside, something which Rowe himself also mentions,
although not in a negative way; he sees another of the developments of modernism as being ‘the tech-
nological advancement of building materials and mechanical systems’ which bring with it ‘an indepen-
dence from local climate and other geographical circumstances, as well as from local building materi-
als, all of which formerly shaped local architectural expressions quite strongly’21. This was of course
the concern of architects like Team Ten, and the later Critical Regionalists, who sought to raise valid
concerns about the monolith of High Modernism. What this study is primarily interested in today is the
endless sameness of architectural expression, not so much to decry how appalling it is (though it can be
pretty appalling in Shanghai), but more by way of contrasting this expression (or lack of it) with earlier
incarnations of Western style that occurred in the urban environment of former colonial cities. Before
the advent of air-conditioning, factors such as local climate and traditional building methods were taken
into account, resulting in environmentally responsible, and often extremely elegant styles of architec-
ture. The Singapore black-and-white bungalow would be a good example of this hybrid style; a subtle
mix of the then globally ascendant neoclassicism, coupled with a thorough understanding of indigenous
18 Ibid., p. 145.
19 Ibid., pp. 144-145.
20 Ibid., p. 140.
21 Ibid., p. 17.
44
Malay building techniques (i.e. raising the house on stilts, making use of overhanging eves, open veran-
das, etc.), which resulted in an elegant and remarkably comfortable home, and a style which has since
become an icon.
China’s current embrace of experimental architecture, particularly for state-sponsored projects
like Beijing’s Olympic venues, is something Rowe sees ‘…spectators in the future might be forgiven for
labelling this form of hyper-modernism as a Chinese style’22. The fact that most of these projects’ archi-
tects are Westerners makes this a little unlikely, but Rowe does raise a valid point: what is Western and
what Chinese? Is it a Chinese building simply because it is built in China? Would it be Chinese if it were
designed by a Chinese but built in New York? What if there were equal numbers of Westerners and Chi-
nese on the design team? And what about the places those designers have been educated? If Chinese, or
Asians, or Africans for that matter, borrow from the West selectively and cleverly, as the Chinese have
been doing, then they are creating a new hybrid, one that has every potential to be as successful as the
Singapore black-and-white bungalow.
One point underlying this entire discussion, and one that will be looked at in detail in Part IV, is
what Peter G. Rowe calls the underlying ‘socio-cultural matrix’ in East Asia23: basically neo-Confucian-
ism. This harks back to the rule of law issue touched on earlier, and the difficulty of defining a universal
human right (without its being some sort of overtly Western construction). Rowe correctly identifies the
fact that ‘[c]ivil society, strong in the West, is almost uniformly weak [in Asia] and a bifurcated view
was often taken in pursuit of Westernized practical applications alongside indigenous socio-cultural
biases and practices that often stressed collectivism, consensus and the interests of relations, clans,
companies and other circumscribed politico-economic groups’24. While not interested in the politics of
this bifurcation per se, what this research wishes to investigate is how it is inscribed in the built environ-
ment, particularly in Shanghai.
Rowe correctly identifies what he calls the ‘ambiguity between public and private realms in East
Asian cities’25; deeply rooted cultural concepts underlie this ambiguity, relationships that we as Western-
ers often overlook, or simply cannot see because they are too far removed from our own understanding
of what constitutes public space, and this is perhaps the most important point that can be made in this
entire thesis: the wish to show how ‘ambiguous realms’ operate, which will be done in the practical ex-
amination of the Shanghai alleyway house, and also, and more importantly, the examination of the cul-
tural concepts underpinning the Chinese understanding of what actually constitutes public space.
China’s development
When Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics it was clearly seen as an endorsement of Japan’s re-
emergence onto the world stage. Japan had managed to put its aggressive past behind it and, thanks to
the economic miracle of the 1950s and ’60s, was seen as having come of age. South Korea, with an
economic career closely modelled on that of its near neighbour and former colonial master, hosted the
Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988, again after a period of remarkable economic growth, it too was also
able to lay to rest the unfortunate Korean War (1950-53), (at least the southern portion of the peninsula
was). Beijing’s hosting of the 2008 Summer Games, a mere seven years after being admitted to the
World Trade Organisation (in December 2001), and less than twenty after the disastrous Tiananmen
Square incident, is one very clear way in which the global community can recognise China’s arrival.
Summer 2008 is almost precisely thirty years since Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Open Door’ policy was
launched. Deng was China’s arch-survivor, he had accompanied Chairman Mao on the Long March, had
made it through the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, where he survived being labelled the ‘Number
2 capitalist-roader’ by the Red Guards, and the fact that the notorious Gang of Four (led by Mao’s wife
22 Ibid., p. 139.
23 Ibid., p. 167.
24 Ibid., p. 192.
25 Ibid., p. 194.
45
Jiang Qing) twice tried to get rid of him; yet through all of this he continued to work to bring about
what he considered to be the best policies for China. In December of 1978 (not September as David
Smith would have us believe26), the decision was taken, at the Third Plenum of the 11th Congress of
the Chinese Communist Party, to re-orient China’s economy towards the market. Deng’s economic
pragmatism, untainted by impractical idealism or theoretical fanaticism of any kind, was intended
as a new direction for China. According to Manuel Castells it was also intended as ‘an answer to the
impact of Taiwan’s economic miracle’27; it actively encouraged entrepreneurs as well as establishing a
productive and profitable relationship with the West – the bedrock on which the new China’s ‘economic
miracle’ is founded.
As we have already seen, China’s has been the world’s fastest growing economy for the past
three decades. It has expanded at an average rate of almost 10 percent per year (and between 2000
and 2005 averaged 9.5 percent in real terms, with imports tripling from $225 billion to $660 billion).
The country has in fact accounted for some 12 percent of all growth in world trade in recent years,
an even more impressive figure when it is remembered that in 2000 it had accounted for less than 4
percent. The IIEC and CSIS have listed some other impressive statistics: in 2005 China was the world’s
fourth largest economy (measured in dollars at the 2005 exchange rate), up two places from Ted C.
Fishman’s estimate of seventh place in 2003 (when it had a GDP of $1.4 trillion); China has increased
its output by a factor of nine since 1978 and is now second only to the United States as a recipient of
foreign direct investment; China is also now the world’s third largest trading nation, behind the United
States and Germany, and ahead of regional rival Japan28. Manuel Castells see China’s development as
already having changed world history. The country’s economic growth and competitiveness has stunned
governments and business alike, and have resulted in some contradictory feelings. The lure of more
than one billion Chinese consumers may well diffuse any crisis in overproduction for the short-term
future, something that Castells quite cannily sees as consolidating global capitalism’s hegemony in the
twenty-first century. Yet the emergence of what is also a major military power, and the persistence in the
Chinese Communist Party’s control over Chinese society has triggered concerns about a potential Cold
War. Castells, being the enlightened commentator that he is, sees things from a broader perspective,
concentrating more on the benefits that can accrue from the growing interaction between the rest of the
world and what is ‘humankind’s oldest civilization, with its extraordinary cultural tradition [as] certain
to enhance spiritual enrichment and reciprocal learning’29.
Global capitalism’s rise in the twenty-first century, particularly its influence by ‘Chinese
characteristics’, may well see transformations every bit as dramatic as those that occurred since the
1970s. Victor Nee and Sonja Opper, in a 2006 paper for the World Bank, defined China’s system as
‘politicized capitalism’30, they see the state apparatus as setting the regulatory framework in which
business operates but also as actually interfering in its decisions; this they correctly characterise as a
‘hybrid economic order’ arguing that it should be viewed as a transitional stage31. The Chinese are,
according to David Smith, ‘breaking the normal rules of economic development’32, something he sees
in China’s efforts to gain access to high technology, sometimes with the connivance of multi-national
corporations interested in making money (sometimes by dint of even more creative methods). According
to the IIEC and CSIS, China’s failure to protect intellectual property rights is probably the second most
important source of friction in bilateral ties with the United States33. Though The Economist makes the
26 David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 56.
27 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 286.
28 IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet; Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 3.
29 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 308.
30 Cited in David Smith’s The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 188.
31 Victor Nee and Sonja Opper, cited in David Smith’s The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the
New World Order, p. 188.
32 David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 233.
33 IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. 95.
46
important point that these intellectual-property violations actually cost American firms far less than
many of them would have us believe: pirated DVDs may sell for a fraction of their cost in Shanghai’s
flea markets, but the people who buy them could ill afford them at the full price34.
The Chinese may well have a different understanding of what constitutes intellectual property
rights, certainly it is different from that which usually obtains in the West, but if they want to join the
global market, they simply have to abide by the rules laid down by international trading bodies such
as the World Trade Organisation, why else would they go to all that trouble to join them? However, as
global capitalism is constantly undergoing transformation, might not this be one other aspect of it that
will have to change in order to keep up? The Internet has already begun to alter how music and films are
bought, or at least accessed and downloaded – this is all part of Manuel Castells’s qualitative changes in
society. And is not one of the hallmarks of the entrepreneurial mindset the ability to bend or even break
the rules? If so, the West can hardly complain when, having set the rules in the first place, a country like
China comes along and beats them at their own game.
Manuel Castells reminds us that the Chinese Revolution of 1949 was primarily ‘a nationalist
revolution with socialist characteristics’35. It followed a prolonged period of Japanese aggression in
China (1894-1945), which was ineptly resisted by a corrupt Kuomintang government, which later fled
to Taiwan and set up a military dictatorship; an action that has resulted in a dangerous situation which
still requires considerable delicacy in handling; Taiwan is still seen as a ‘renegade province’ by China.
Castells’s analysis of China’s recent history is as good a place as any to start in trying to make sense
of what is happening in the country today. The basic fact that no one can ignore is that the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) has survived the upheavals of the last half-century and is still in power. Often
in spite of what Castells calls ‘its own suicidal tendencies (that is Maoism)’, what he means here is
that the CCP has shown a ‘political strength far greater than that of any other communist experience’36.
Maoism may have done a lot of damage – no one, least of Castells, is denying that – but students of
China’s history must be wary of the sort of shrill excesses indulged in by commentators such as Jung
Chang and Jon Halliday, who seem determined to paint as bleak a picture as possible37. Maoism,
according to Castells, ‘actually expressed one answer to the fundamental problem of the Chinese
revolution: how to make China strong, and independent, while preserving Communist power, in a world
dominated by superpowers, and where technological and economic development were proceeding apace
on the opposite shores of the China Sea’38.
Chairman Mao’s path to self-reliance, emphasising ideology and the preservation of rural life
(backed up by guerrilla warfare where necessary – with a nuclear deterrent as a last resort), was directly
opposed to Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shao-shi’s accelerated industrialisation, economic growth, and
technological modernisation (admittedly along the Soviet model at the time). Zhou En-Lai managed to
steer a centrist course, preserving China’s technological-military complex – seen as the guarantee of
national independence – which managed to survive the turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s. With the defeat
of the Gang of Four, Deng returned to power (he had spent the Cultural Revolution sweeping the streets
in his hometown Chongqing), finally he was able to implement his economic plans. In Castells’s view
the timing of this was vitally important because after the excesses of Mao’s decade-long, Red-Guard-
led madness (what Castells calls ‘a murderous ideological orgy’), only ‘the immediate improvement
of living conditions, the diffusion of property rights, and the prospects of a better life in their lifetime,
could rally the Chinese again around a revamped Communist regime’39. So Deng not only introduced
economic reform, leading to the transformative, hybrid capitalism we are seeing today, but also,
ironically, strengthened the Communist Party’s grip on the country in the process.
40 Ibid., p. 312.
41 Ibid., p. 312.
42 Ibid., p. 312.
43 Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, p. 32.
44 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 315.
45 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 637.
46 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 317.
48
competitive at the national and international levels’47.
However, as the market economy spreads it is becoming increasingly difficult to exercise
political control without creating chaos. Manuel Castells identifies three main reasons for this. First,
the centres of capital accumulation are mainly controlled by provincial or local enterprises, with
direct links to foreign markets and financial resources. Second, the rapid growth of gumin (stock-
crazed speculators) who are using information technology to trade in Shanghai and Shenzhen’s stock
markets from anywhere in China and hence bypassing government controls. And third, the new power
equilibrium in China has taken on a complex pattern of interdependence between the centre and its
regions. Castells thinks that any attempt by the centre to curtail a region’s economic autonomy could
not only derail the economic reforms, but could upset the fragile status quo that has been reached in
this communist-capitalist state. With the Soviet experience of a communist state’s effort to make the
transition to capitalism ending in such disaster, the Chinese leadership is understandably proceeding
with extreme caution. Castells sums up by saying that China’s economic development and technological
modernisation is being pursued by a communist leadership as the indispensable tool for national
power, as well as a new principle of legitimacy for the one-party state. He sees this as an historical
merger between a developmental state and a revolutionary one, a complex balancing act but one with
‘reasonable, but not certain, chances of future success’48.
47 Ibid., p. 320.
48 Ibid., p. 313 (italicised in original).
49 Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 227.
50 David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 109.
51 Ibid., p. 41.
52 Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 14.
53 IIEC and CSIS, China: The Balance Sheet, p. 33.
54 The Economist, May 19-25, 2007, ‘America’s Fear of China’.
49
meet even their own air emission standards, while nearly 200 of them fall short of the World Health Or-
ganisation’s standard for airborne particulates55. Indeed, as Ted C. Fishman quotes from the Far Eastern
Economic Review, the United States State Department refuses permission for diplomats with asthmatic
family members to be posted to a number of Chinese cities56.
Apart from the potential damage to the environment caused by China’s rapid economic growth,
the fact of its increasingly bad pollution record seems to have emboldened the United States to persist in
its own less than stellar efforts to clean up its own act; America’s failure to sign the Kyoto Accord has
been seen by many as a sort of shrug of the metaphorical shoulders, but if anything, China’s increasing
environmental damage should be seen as advancing rather than regressing the cause of global environ-
mentalism.
One other, and somewhat odd, side-effect of China’s thirst for natural resources is the emergence
of an almost colonial relationship between it and some of the world’s less developed countries, particu-
larly in Africa. With 90 percent of China’s oil imports being transported by ocean-going tankers, the
country’s energy requirements are having a very real effect on its diplomatic policies. Beijing’s attempts
to bypass potential chokepoints, such as the Straits of Malacca (through which the IIEC and CSIS reck-
on 80 percent of its oil imports pass), has spurred the development of port facilities in Pakistan, Bangla-
desh, and Burma (Myanmar)57. Much as the world’s sea lanes were kept open for trade in the nineteenth
century by Britain’s sea power and the Pax Britannica, so too are the world’s waterways today patrolled
by the United States Navy, a fact which China can only view as a strategic vulnerability should bilateral
relations ever sour. Ted C. Fishman agrees, apart from the risk of collision, or piracy, or a terrorist at-
tack, China sees the patrolling of the world’s sea lanes for itself as of central strategic importance, while
also exploring other options, such as the laying of new oil pipelines via Thailand and Russia58.
David Smith has also highlighted the rapid growth of China’s percentage in the African trade,
with the ‘share of sub-Saharan Africa’s exports going to China increasing more than twentyfold be-
tween 1990 and 2004. China-Africa trade is closing fast on trade between America and Africa’59. David
Smith quotes Vivienne Walt of Fortune as saying that ‘China refuses to join in Western rebuke of Afri-
can corruption and human rights abuses… Much like the militant Islamic officials in Tehran – another
of China’s key oil suppliers – many African leaders regard China as a balance to Western meddling’60.
Smith sees China as hard at work building ‘close, almost colonial relationships with small commodity-
producing countries’61.
China is in fact one of the world’s few surviving political entities that can reasonably be de-
scribed as an empire. Large swathes of territory that fall within China’s borders today have been an-
nexed or otherwise taken over in a way that is typically colonial or imperial, for example, Mongolia,
Manchuria, and Tibet. These regions, imperial annexations or not, are to all intents and purposes Chi-
nese, and commentary of a political nature on their status today is not the purview of this study.
One other final point regarding oil supply is that Japan’s post-war constitution forbade them an
army (or a navy), hence even at the height of their economic prowess in the 1980s they were always
beholden to the United States who could have choked off their oil supply any time they chose. China,
on the other hand, is doing everything it can to ensure that it shall never find itself in such an invidious
position.
Now we turn from the general to the particular, with a look at the effects this rapid development
is having on Shanghai, particularly as it is supposed to be in the vanguard of China’s bid for global
greatness. When this study began in 2005, it was commonplace to hear of Hong Kong’s coming eclipse
[D]ominated by little-reformed state enterprises, a powerful bureaucracy that does not under-
stand the underpinnings of healthy financial markets, and a Communist Party that doles out pref-
erential policies and promotions to those who kowtow to it. Under current conditions, the full
abilities of the Shanghainese have yet to be tested. Only when market forces hold sway, the city
gets over s state-enterprise bias, and it is free to run itself will the Shanghainese be able to take
advantage of their city’s myriad advantages to make Shanghai a serious contender.65
Shanghai’s experience from 2001 to 2005 saw share prices halve and stockbrokers who had of-
fered guaranteed returns found themselves badly exposed. Something that, according to David Smith,
‘set back the cause of investor-led capitalism in China for years’66. Smith also reminds us that in Sep-
tember of 2006 Chen Liangyu, Shanghai’s Communist Party Secretary, was removed from office for
alleged corruption, which Smith sees as ‘a reflection in microcosm of China’s problems; overbearing
bureaucracy combined, paradoxically, with weak regulation’67, something which may well be a result of
the neo-Confucian underpinning of the socio-cultural matrix in East Asia highlighted by Peter G. Rowe
earlier. Fewer than 1,000 firms are listed on the Shanghai stock market, with China’s best companies
tending to go further afield: to Hong Kong or Singapore, London or New York68. Pamela Yatsko also
foresaw Shanghai’s problems in its attempts to catch up with Hong Kong despite having advantages
such as ‘a huge domestic market, lower costs, a larger labor pool, an up-and-coming reputation, and
Beijing’s backing’69.
Hong Kong has enjoyed a larger pool of financial talent than Shanghai for decades, something
that Yatsko was quick to point out back in 2001, this is also something we saw David R. Meyer
highlight when discussing the social aspects of a global city’s place in a network. Hong Kong has other
advantages over Shanghai as well, not the least of which is the fact that it offers a better standard of
living, better medical care, better schools, better English, and has easy access to nature70. Although
Shanghai is improving, it is still considered a ‘hardship post’ for most expatriates; the city lacks many
of the advantages that are taken for granted in Hong Kong or Singapore. One of the most challenging
for any foreigner posted to Shanghai must be a lack of basic English, meaning that in order to engage
in anything other than the most rudimentary of daily transactions in the city proficiency in Chinese is
needed.
62 Ibid., p. 190.
63 Ibid., p. 190.
64 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 87.
65 Ibid., p. 89.
66 David Smith, The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order, p. 190.
67 Ibid., p. 190.
68 Ibid., p. 190.
69 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 85.
70 Ibid., p. 85.
51
To end this chapter on China’s resurgence it might be useful to take a look at life in China’s cit-
ies for the people who are not members of the global elite. These are the people who form the vast ma-
jority in a city like Shanghai, and they are being increasingly excluded from parts of the city that they
used to call home. Ted C. Fishman sees China’s huge population as being the basic fact behind the coun-
try’s rapid economic ascendance in recent years. Hundreds of millions of peasants are now leaving the
countryside; the largest such migration in human history71. China had anything from 100 to 160 cities
with one million or more (America, by comparison, has 9, while Eastern and Western Europe combined
have 36)72. Peter G. Rowe tells us that China is only about 32 percent urban, although he points out that
it is ‘…well on its way to becoming a predominantly urban nation by about 2035, before going on to
stabilize, with a 60 per cent proportion of urban dwellers, probably around 2050’73.
Rowe also notes that the rise in the proportion of urban dwellers is being driven by the very shift
in distribution that Fishman has mentioned earlier, rather than by overall growth. According to Fishman,
during the last four decades of the twentieth century the world experienced unprecedented urban growth,
most of it the result of migration from rural areas. In 1950, approximately 30 percent of the world’s pop-
ulation lived in cities (a mere six percentage points under China’s current figure). In fact, for most of the
second half of the twentieth century China’s pace of urbanisation lagged behind the rest of the world,
so is it any wonder that it is trying to catch up? However, according to the IIEC and CSIS, China’s
current pace of urbanisation is unparalleled in history, the estimate is that China’s urban population will
balloon by 200 million within the space of a decade74.
One of the most important challenges facing China’s government in the future will be lessen-
ing the income gap between urban and rural areas. One other area of inequality that has long existed in
China is that of the developed coastal areas and inland regions, a gap that has continued to increase in
recent years. The infrastructure that is being created in order for the country to compete globally (we
have already seen the increase in road and air travel networks), is also causing populations to become
displaced, forcing them to make way for the new roads, airports, dams, and factories. According to a
2005 report, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimates that up to 40 million peasants have
been forced off their land to make way for these infrastructure projects, with an additional two million
being displaced every year75; these millions become China’s ‘floating population’ and are flocking into
urban areas in search of new means of livelihood. Vast migrant-worker ‘towns’ are springing up on the
edges of major cities, storing up potential environmental, health and safety issues, as well as poverty
and rising levels of dissatisfaction with the way the country is being run. According to the IIEC and
CSIS, China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission estimated the number of internal
migrants to be 53.5 million in 1995 and well over 140 million by 200476. In fact, migrant workers
account for approximately 20 percent of China’s working-age population (i.e. those between 15 and 64
years old)77.
In the early 1980s Deng Xiaoping dismissed any potential problems regarding future inequality
with the memorable phrase ‘some people have to get rich first’, recently Chinese leaders have begun to
take cognisance of the fact that such inequalities, if they are allowed to increase unabated, could lead
to political instability, with the result that they have begun to implement policies designed to accelerate
both the pace of farm-income growth and the economic development of interior provinces that have
been left behind in the rush to the market.
In the new China some people may very well get rich first, but some others are going to get old
before they get rich: China’s ageing population is going to face some unusual as well as unpleasant
78 Ibid., p. 48.
79 Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 102..
80 David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 123.
81 Ibid., p. 123.
82 Ibid., p. 123.
83 Ibid., p. 123.
53
4 PUDONG
The word ‘modern’ was first transliterated into Chinese in Shanghai. Since the city’s inception as a colo-
nial enclave in 1842 Shanghai has long been synonymous with the new, the innovative, and the daring.
For a century and a half, any changes that China has seen have typically been visible in Shanghai before
anywhere else. In its colonial heyday – the 1920s and ’30s – Shanghai was ranked as one of the world’s
five most important commercial centres, (the other four were London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo1); the
city was also reckoned to be the world’s second-busiest
port at the time2. After the hiatus of 1949-90 Shanghai
is once again China’s most modern city, the testbed for
economic innovation and the nexus of the country’s
global financial ambitions. Darryl Chen calls Shang-
hai ‘…more a process than a static cityscape, with its
explosion of object buildings tempered by new infra-
structure, parks and conservation the city presents an
almost unique control-model kind of urban subject mat-
ter among the world’s major metropolises’3. Chen also
warns against drawing hasty conclusions in a city which
lends itself so easily to cliché and whose presence in
popular imagination is potently fuelled by what he calls
‘a mythologized past’4. One must indeed beware of
nostalgia in any study of Shanghai, an issue that will be
touched on later in Chapter 6 of Part I, in the analysis of
the Xintiandi redevelopment in the city’s former French
Concession, and again in Part IV, Chapter 3, when the
role of nostalgia in the cultural construction of percep-
tion will be examined.
Shanghai’s recent rise to dizzying global heights
has made the city synonymous with urban redevelop-
ment of the most brutal kind. According to Richard
Turnbull, ‘[b]y 2000 half the buildings from the late
1940s, the vast majority colonial, had been razed to
Figure 5. Map of Greater Shanghai (source:
Shanghai shi di tu) make way for 200,000 high-rises’5, he also refers to
the city as ‘the world’s largest construction site’6. The
government is investing heavily in urban infrastruc-
ture, what Darryl Chen calls the ‘hardware of any global city’7. It opened its first metro line in 1994 (it
now has three, and is currently constructing three more), and as we have just seen it is also home to the
world’s first commercial Maglev (magnetic levitation) line, which links the new Pudong Airport to the
city. Overhead expressways have been snaking their way across the city since the 1990s, as have new
river bridges, and an outer ring road. Shanghai is also home to China’s first Formula One racetrack, and
the city has also successfully bid for the World Expo in 2010. But before we go into these infrastructural
developments in detail, it may be useful to give some background to the development of Pudong.
15 Ibid., p. 30.
16 Ibid., p. 31.
17 Ibid., p. 27.
18 Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 33.
19 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 28.
20 Ibid., p. 29.
21 Ibid., p. 32.
22 Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 32.
23 Non Arkaraprasertkul, ‘Politicisation and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism’, Footprint, spring 2008.
24 Aldo Rossi, quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 83.
25 Ibid., p. 83.
26 Charles Jencks, quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 83.
56
delays in its construction have meant that it will now never achieve that coveted status. Even as an icon
it has raised some awkward issues, the circular opening at its top was originally planned to contain a
Ferris wheel, but this has since been scrapped and the opening changed to a rectangle because its shape
was felt to be too reminiscent of the Japanese flag. The project developer, a Japanese called Mori, wisely
took these concerns to heart – memories of World War II are, as we have already seen, bitter in China.
Quite apart from the irony that the World Financial Centre also seems somehow to reflect in micro-
cosm the sort of problems plaguing the city’s efforts to rebrand itself as a global leader (namely over-
confidence and a slightly misplaced ambition) what we are seeing here is the manifestation of an even
more interesting global phenomenon: Deyan Sudjic has pointed out that something interesting happened
to the global balance of cultural power in February 1996, when the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, were finished. Their completion meant that for the first time since the Gothic cathedral the
world’s tallest structure was no longer in the West27. The tallest towers in the world are now being built
in places that few Westerners could even find on a map: Pusan in South Korea; Tianjin and Guangzhou
in China; and seven years after the Petronas Towers were completed they were surpassed by Taiwan’s
Taipei 101, a further 30 metres higher.
While this desire to built the tallest, the biggest, and the most daring, may seem to be somewhat
childish, there can be no denying that the Petronas Towers have lifted Kuala Lumpur, and Malaysia, out
of Asian anonymity; Taipei 101 has done the same for Taiwan. In fact, since the middle of the 1990s
most of the world’s tallest buildings are being constructed in Asia, the largest too, as well as the most
daring and innovative in engineering and design terms. If we are going to see the influence of one part
of the world on another in the twenty-first century it may well be flowing from Asia to the West; and that
would hardly be for the first time. Of course this can also be seen as just another example of increased
globalisation, but this can no longer simply be characterised as Westernisation.
So much for the buildings, what of the institutions that have been set up in them? Shanghai’s
capital markets grew into China’s largest during the 1990s. The Shanghai exchange had a total mar-
ket capitalisation of 1.06 trillion yuan (US$128 billion) by 1999, which was comfortably ahead of its
national rival in Shenzhen (which achieved 0.888 trillion yuan (US$107 billion)28). The Shanghai ex-
change has some 480 companies listed (53 more than Shenzhen), and it also handles most of China’s
treasury bond trading and repurchasing29. In terms of the sheer number of companies listed, and the
volume traded, Shanghai’s exchange seemed set to surpass Hong Kong’s within the first few years of the
twenty-first century, and in 1996 and 1997 Shanghai’s daily turnover actually exceeded Hong Kong’s
on some days30. But Shanghai, as we have seen from David Smith’s analysis earlier, has not overtaken
Hong Kong. There are a number of factors that may explain this. In the run up to the handover of Hong
Kong to China (1 July 1997), investors were uncertain of the colony’s future, which may have damp-
ened market activity; this was not helped by the Asian crisis, which was sparked off by the Thai baht’s
collapse the very next day (2 July) and which sent shockwaves throughout the region. As the dust began
to settle Hong Kong, now a Special Administrative Region of a China being seen to honour its com-
mitments to the former colony, began to regain some of its confidence. The crisis, even though its most
devastating effects were felt in Southeast Asia, must have made Shanghai investors think twice before
parting with their hard-earned cash, certainly the markets suffered (we have already seen Manuel Cas-
tells highlighting the behaviour of the gumin (stock-crazed speculators)).
Pamela Yatsko had foreseen some of the problems Shanghai was likely to face; she quoted Jack
Wadsworth when listing the steps Shanghai would need to take if it was to operate as a fully fledged
financial centre: ‘a yuan convertible on the capital account; high-quality listed companies; a national
securities law, uniform disclosure, and consistent regulation; a series of reliable intermediaries (i.e. se-
31 Jack Wadsworth, quoted in Pamela Yatsko’s New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary
City, p. 62.
32 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, pp. 62-63.
33 Ibid., p. 82.
34 Ibid., p. 82.
35 Ibid., p. 79.
36 Cited in Stella Dong’s Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 10.
37 Neil Leach, China, p. 70.
38 Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 31.
39 Ibid., p. 21.
58
were simply availing themselves of the most logical choice.
What must be highlighted here, however, is the misguided notion that has driven Shanghai’s
city planners to build endless arrays of skyscrapers, thinking that global greatness will somehow invari-
ably follow. It is not the hardware of a global city that determines whether it will succeed or not (i.e. the
buildings and infrastructure), but the software (the people). It is Hong Kong’s people who are keeping
that city at the forefront of the international market. Shanghai may be improving but its perception of
being a ‘hardship posting’ will have to change if the city wants to attract members of the global elite
in significant numbers. One other factor that is of concern is that while Shanghai is indeed building the
hardware of a global city, it has cleared away as much as 10 percent of the 4.7 million households that
make up the city to make room for all of this new development. These people have been moved to new
housing developments on the outskirts of the city40. At one level this has led to a material improvement
in many people’s lives, who now find themselves living in more spacious apartments, but it has also
had a devastating effect on their way of life, shattering the delicately woven web of social networks that
they used to enjoy while living in the city centre, especially that of the now rapidly vanishing alleyway
houses. People may be living more comfortably in the suburbs but they are increasingly cut off from old
friends and neighbours. Living so far out means it can take the best part of a day (even using the city’s
impressive new public transport) to revisit old neighbourhoods (if they are still there), not to mention
former friends who may live right across this vast city.
40 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 33.
59
5 PUBLIC SPACE, EMPTY SPACE
This chapter examines the new public spaces of Shanghai in order to try and find out why some of
them are so curiously dead. What has gone wrong here is a failure to understand exactly what is public
space, the same failing that manifested
itself so disastrously during the twentieth-
century’s era of High Modernism. There
was a curious, even threatening, feeling
in British council estates, or American
‘projects’, an unsettling deadness in the
so-called ‘streets in the sky’ that were so
beloved of the designers of social housing
after World War II, and which had so little
in common with real streets. Jane Jacobs
has made some profoundly important
points about what actually makes a street
work. She sees the pavement (which she
refers to as a ‘sidewalk’) as nothing in
and of itself, its meaning comes ‘only in
conjunction with the buildings and other
Figure 7. Lujiazui, artist’s impression (source: Shanghai:
uses that border it’1. According to Jacobs:
Architecture and Urbaniam for Modern China, p.91)
if a city’s streets look interesting, then the
city looks interesting; conversely if they
2
look dull, the city looks dull . This may sound obvious, but then many of Jacobs’s points are obvious,
and none the less valuable for that: ‘…[t]he sight of people attracts still other people’3, ‘[o]nce a street
is well equipped to handle strangers, once it has both a good, effective demarcation between private and
public spaces and has a basic supply of activity and eyes, the more strangers the merrier’4. All obvious
points and yet all profoundly important. Yet it is simple points such as these that were missed by some
of the architects of the Modern period, leading to disastrously awful social housing, with all its atten-
dant social problems. And while the view that housing conditions cause social problems is of course too
simplistic, sometimes it can act as a contributory factor. It is this same sort of misunderstanding of what
constitutes public spaces that is plaguing Shanghai today.
David Harvey has emphasised the importance of Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, not least because ‘…it was one of the earliest, most articulate, and most influential
of the anti-modernist tracts, but also because it sought to define a whole mode of approach to under-
standing urban life’5. He quotes her as blaming the ‘Great Blight of Dullness’ as having arisen from ‘a
profound misunderstanding of what cities are about’6: that is that cities are ‘…an intricate system of
organized rather than disorganised complexity’7. According to Harvey, modernists saw space as some-
thing to be shaped for social purposes and hence subservient to the construction of a social project8. He
undertakes his analysis the better to articulate what postmodernism actually is, or was, but in so doing
manages to set out quite cogently what modernism was all about as well, not to mention where it went
1 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 37.
2 Ibid., p. 37.
3 Ibid., p. 47.
4 Ibid., p. 52.
5 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 71.
6 Quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 72.
7 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 72-73 (italics in original).
8 Ibid., p. 66.
60
awry. Harvey sees postmodern architecture and urban design as breaking away from the ‘…modernist
idea that planning and development should focus on large-scale, metropolis-wide, technologically ra-
tional and efficient urban plans, backed by absolutely no-frills architecture (the austere “functionalist”
surfaces of “international style” modernism)’9, and he quotes Roland Barthes as saying that ‘the city is a
discourse and this discourse is truly a language’10; as a result, ‘we ought to pay close attention to what is
being said’11.
Jane Jacobs was paying close attention to what American cities were saying, and what she heard
was the healthy hum of an intricate system of organised rather than disorganised complexity that was
steadily declining in the wake of modernist
‘improvements’. She saw that ‘[u]nder the
seeming disorder of the old city, wherever
the old city is working successfully, is a
marvelous order for maintaining the safety
of the streets and the freedom of the city. It
is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy
of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant
succession of eyes. This order is all com-
posed of movement and change…’12. Jacobs
is quick to point out that ‘there is nothing
simple about the order itself, or the bewil-
dering number of components that go into
it. Most of these components are special-
ized in one way or another. They unite in
Figure 8. Century Avenue at the Shanghai Science and their joint effort upon the sidewalk, which
Technology Museum, Pudong (source: author photograph) is not specialized in the least. That is its
strength’13. What she brilliantly infers from
all of this is the fact that while most of
what goes on on a city’s pavements (or sidewalks) is ‘ostensibly utterly trivial’ the sum of all this activ-
ity is ‘not trivial at all’14.
Very little of this is being understood in the new public spaces of Shanghai, yet the older spaces
– in the alleyway houses – did not need any understanding of theory in order to work, their inhabit-
ants got on with their daily lives, the million trivial tasks that constitute the life force of these vibrant
streets and lanes, and all in spaces that would hardly constitute public space at all, at least as it would
be understood in the West. Taking Jane Jacobs’s reading of a city’s sidewalks as a point of departure, it
is possible to discern a rich street life in Shanghai’s alleyways, a life that was lived in public, in a way
native to the Chinese, and often invisible to Western observers. Yet if the observer takes a closer look,
they will indeed be able see an ‘intricate system of organised rather than disorganised complexity’. This
organised complexity will be analysed in the next chapter, first it is important to highlight some of the
older spaces that have enjoyed such a rich and vibrant life for so many generations. Sadly it is a way of
life now under threat, often from designers who are trying to re-create a new public life for the city’s
spaces, but it is one which often fails to compare with the old ones that are being destroyed.
David Harvey maintains that space tends to get treated as ‘a fact of nature’, becoming natura-
lised through the assigning of common-sense, everyday meanings15. A sort of homogenisation of space
16 Ibid., p. 257.
17 Ibid., p. 232.
18 Ibid., pp. 232-233.
19 Ibid., p. 234.
20 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 380.
21 Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, pp. 139-144.
62
thought it would, (i.e. like the countries he was buying from). Jane Jacobs scathingly points out that the
Tsar seems to have mistaken development for the collecting of the things required for producing it; a
dangerous exercise in self-deception. Development is actually a process of change, and one of the most
important points in Jacobs’s insightful book is the fact that this process cannot be bought.
This thesis is not for one moment suggesting that China is making the same mistakes as Russia’s
former Tsar, indeed, the Chinese are making far too canny a use of the technologies that have given the
West its wealth for them ever to be accused of such a blunder. It is merely pointing out that the curious
deadness of some of Shanghai’s new public space could be
the result of a similarly blinkered vision (and do not forget
that many of these spaces are being designed by Western-
ers). This only goes to highlight the point that it is never
enough to simply rely on the importation of what Pamela
Yatsko calls the hardware of a global city, certainly not if
in so doing the software, i.e. the people, are harmed.
The clearing away of the Shanghai’s alleyway
houses to make way for plazas and skyscrapers, regret-
table and all as this is, is not just about the fundamental
dialogue between the rich and the poor, a phenomenon
that could hardly be termed new – the poor have always
been swept away by the rich who have seen them as an
impediment to their getting even richer (one notorious
historical example would be the great Scottish estates in
the nineteenth century, where crofters who had farmed
the land for centuries were forced to move out simply to
give the aristocratic owners more room for grouse shoot-
ing). Michelle Tsung-yi Huang quotes Saskia Sassen in
stating that the heart of this problem for Shanghai is the
Figure 10. World Financial Centre (source: fact that ‘…the claims of the professional managerial class
author photograph) are rarely questioned, and as a result the urban space of a
global city is ceaselessly subjected to the claims imposed
by the new users’22. This ‘reflexive life-planning’, as
Manuel Castells calls it, ‘becomes impossible, except for the elite inhabiting the timeless space of flows
of global networks and their ancillary locales’23. As we have seen, as many as 10 percent of Shanghai’s
households have been forced to move to make way for all of this global hardware, in Lujiazui alone, the
four-square-kilometre heart of Pudong, 52,000 households (approximately 169,000 people) were moved
to clear the way for the iconic headquarters of these global corporate players24; while across town, in
places like Hongqiao and Gubei, the simple matter of market price has had an equally devastating effect;
those unable to pay up to US$2,650 per square metre for an apartment have also found themselves with
no option other than to move to cheaper areas further away from the centre. Lessening the income gaps
that have opened up between various city dwellers, as well as between urban and rural areas, and coastal
and inland regions which we have seen earlier, is going to be one of the key challenges facing China in
the twenty-first century.
22 Quoted in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space
in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 108.
23 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. 11.
24 Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong
Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 113.
63
Public space or left-over space?
The space between Shanghai’s iconic new buildings is even more interesting than the buildings them-
selves. The Pudong district may resemble Manhattan from a distance, but if one wanders around be-
tween the soaring towers one soon realises that this area has nothing of the vibrancy and dynamism
of New York. The space that has been left between these huge new corporate headquarters is just that:
left over. Michelle Tsung-yi Huang investigates this phenomenon by examining the effects globalisa-
tion is having on the lived space of everyday lives in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai. She defines
the Baudelairean flâneur strolling aimlessly through the city as the right and freedom to derive pleasure
from wandering the streets; walking was a means of exploring the shifting social space while also at-
tempting to assert the privilege of being at home in the world. She also highlights Shanghai writer’s
Wang Anyi’s work, where life in old Shanghai is lovingly portrayed, particularly life in the alleyway
houses, which Huang sees as illustrating the gap between the ‘…dazzling new look of the city against
the vanished older version represented by the minutia of daily life…’25. Walking, especially when seen
against the backdrop of the fast-paced global city, serves Huang as a metaphor for remembering the past
or as a practice of everyday life. Globalisation not only brings specific spatial forms into being in the
city, it also creates new social structures as well.
This new globalisation creates what Saskia Sassen calls ‘a sort of urban glamour zone’26. Some-
thing Sassen says ‘sets in motion a whole series of new dynamics of inequality’27, forcing her to pose
the very valid question ‘whose city is it?’. With the denationalising of urban space, and its contestation
thanks to the ‘formation of new claims by transnational actors’, Sassen sees the city as the strategic ter-
rain for the operations of these transnational actors, one that she is quick to point out is hardly ‘a bal-
anced playing field’28. What Peter G. Rowe sees as ‘monotonous or jumbled arrays of architecturally
nondescript buildings and urban landscapes’, with their ‘almost casual juxtapositions of muscular infra-
structure against neighbourhood communities, as well the at times jarring, outlandish and incongruous
instances of architectural production’ seems to characterise the East-Asian urban environment for him29.
He sees it as the result of a top-down control ‘which places emphasis on relatively basic, even crude,
regulatory codes’30, and maintains that because civil society is weak in East Asia this deprives most cit-
ies in the region from ‘…an effective bottom-up capacity to resist constructively the sometimes corrupt-
ed and overwhelming weight of top-down authority’31. Coupled with Saskia Sassen’s claim that ‘[g]lobal
cities are the sites of the overvalorisation of corporate capital…’32 we can see a further devalorisation of
those already disadvantaged.
The disparities between the ‘urban glamour zone’ and what Sassen refers to as ‘the urban war
zone’ have become enormous33. While this may paint too dramatic picture of what is happening in
Shanghai, a city with a remarkably cohesive and peaceable population, it could well be a reflection of
Peter G. Rowe’s view that it does indeed have a weak civil society, but this in turn more reflects the neo-
Confucian ‘shared heritage’ that East Asia as a whole enjoys. This is in fact a very civil society indeed,
not civil in the Western sense (with its the tradition of the Greek agora or Roman forum), but civil in the
simplest sense of the word, as being polite, well-mannered, and friendly.
Peter G. Rowe also quite adroitly points out that the built environment of East-Asian cities is
becoming increasingly homogeneous, with their department stores, shopping malls, financial districts,
pedestrian streets, subways, and neon-lit entertainment districts ‘…all now seemingly produced effort-
25 Ibid., p. 10.
26 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, p. XXXIII.
27 Ibid., p. XXIV.
28 Ibid., p. XXXIV.
29 Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 37.
30 Ibid., p. 37.
31 Ibid., p. 41.
32 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, p. XX.
33 Ibid., p. XXXIII.
64
lessly, in spite of the varied mechanisms of power, politics, relative economic circumstances and other
societal relations’34. There is also the preponderance of uniformly tall buildings in Shanghai, Hong
Kong, and Singapore, all of which seem to be increasingly interchangeable. Transportation infrastruc-
ture often snakes its way between these high-rises without any attempt at disguise or integration, some-
thing that would be considered normal, even necessary, in the West. Rowe sees a greater acceptance of
the expediency of these systems in East-Asian cities, they are seen as a necessary and indeed familiar
part of the urban landscape. The fact that East Asia’s rush to urbanise coincided with ‘…widely avail-
able, sophisticated building technology and stronger means of building protection, resulting in the very
real possibility of constructing more buildings and infrastructure more rapidly’35. Rowe maintains that
historic preservation is weak in most East-Asian cities, that ‘in the mad dash to modernise, old was often
equated with being poor in quality and outmoded’36. The perception of historical heritage as being useful
for tourism is a relatively recent phenomenon in Asia, ‘[c]onsequently, large tracts have been destroyed,
as it seemed the most expedient solution to squalor and overcrowding in many cities…’37.
Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, in their analysis of what constitutes ‘new public domain’,
see public space as important because it is, or should be, used as a space for encounter38. They define
public domain as ‘…those places where an exchange between different social groups is possible and
also actually occurs’39, they also see public space as fulfilling ‘…an important role in increasing the
“social cohesion” in society’40. In their work they draw an important distinction between ‘space’ and
‘place’. Space is what we saw David Harvey warning us about earlier, especially the danger of treating it
as something that can be measured. Hajer and Reijndorp see this understanding of space as being associ-
ated with Enlightenment thinking, of space as denoting emptiness, something that can ‘…be arranged in
unambiguous rational units’41. Place, however, is something they see as a direct criticism of this Enlight-
enment thinking. Space, in their formulation, is not actually empty, nor does it allow a rational filling-in;
place, on the other hand, is ‘…associated with real events (which have taken place there), with myths,
with history and memories’42. Everyday life makes this sort of place take on different meanings; people
put together their ‘…own polycentric urban area and thus [create] a new form of urbanity that is char-
acterised more by agility than by movement’43. This ties in rather neatly with Jane Jacobs’s analysis of
sidewalk or pavement usage in a city. Hajer and Reijndorp also see this ‘new urbanity’ as reflecting new
and highly dynamic ‘“time-space patterns” of citizens’ – which is also a direct link to David Harvey’s
famous formula – in which they see the ‘increasing flexibility in the world of employment, changes in
the form of personal relationships, shared responsibilities in the home, cultural trends in home life and
recreation’44.
The result of all of this is an ‘ephemeral quality’ which Hajer and Reijndorp see as resulting
from ‘…the exponential growth in the use of mobile telephones’45. Meeting people is no longer a matter
of coincidence or, even more importantly, a matter of routine (like visiting a local pub or café), meetings
are now organised on the spur of the moment and via the mobile telephone; this is one of the qualitative
changes highlighted by Manuel Castells earlier on; Hajer and Reijndorp even make use of the term ‘net-
34 Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 32.
35 Ibid., p. 35.
36 Ibid., pp. 34-35.
37 Ibid., p. 35.
38 Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy, p. 10.
39 Ibid., p. 11.
40 Ibid., p. 8.
41 Ibid., p. 36.
42 Ibid., p. 36.
43 Ibid., p. 65.
44 Ibid., p. 65.
45 Ibid., p. 65.
65
work society’ when describing how ‘everyone puts together their own city’46. They see public domain as
an ‘archipelago of enclaves’, where the citizens are continuously occupied with maintaining their own
networks, eschewing potential friction with other groups in what they call a ‘mobility of avoidance’47.
It is this notion of the archipelago of enclaves that is most interesting here because it goes right to the
heart of Hajer and Reijndorp’s definition of public domain as ‘…not so much a place as an experience’48.
And in cases where space, as opposed to place, has being designed to encourage certain modes of be-
haviour, it tends to discourage the very diversity we normally understand to be its greatest feature. What
this means is that many empty public spaces are not the result of poor design, in fact the opposite may
be the case, they may have been over-designed, with what Marc Auge would call an ‘excess of program-
ming’49.
These arguments are correct, coherent, and compelling. They would certainly explain some of
the problems that have occurred in the new public domain as it has emerged recently in the West. In
Asia, however, we find a different set of issues, one of the most important of which is the blurring of
the public and private realm, a blurring so subtle that Western observers are often incapable of seeing it.
Westerners, used to reading the streets of their own cities, can tell at a glance what the social and cul-
tural hierarchies are, and can make intelligent use of the spaces to move through them and get to where
they want to go – the archipelago of enclaves we are all constantly constructing. Asian cities, however,
are much harder to read, not because they are any more complex or diverse than the West, but simply
because they are different. They operate according to different sets of social and cultural rules, each one
as valid as those that obtain in the West, and each as carefully constructed over time due to the myriad
little changes that veer society off into unexpected tangents. And yet there is nothing that cannot be un-
derstood by anyone who makes the effort.
According to Richard Sennett, the contemporary Western definition of ‘public’ and ‘private’
as entirely separate and diametrically opposed domains dates from the end of the seventeenth century.
Public meant open to public scrutiny, whereas private denoted the sheltered region of home life (i.e.
family and friends)50. Peter G. Rowe sees distinctions between community and privacy in Asian cities as
being ‘…less sharply drawn than, say, in the US or Europe, often with a corresponding blurring of pub-
lic, semi-public, semi-private and private spatial realms and a stronger social emphasis on communal-
ity, propriety and conformance’51. While according to Brenda S.A. Yeoh, the Chinese always saw civic
authority as being vested in the various clan associations to which they belonged52. Yeoh is, of course,
writing about colonial Singapore, where the role of the Municipal Commission in improving civic life,
indeed, even the very concept of the ‘public good’ itself, was ‘…little appreciated if not totally misun-
derstood’ by Asian people53.
There are numerous examples of colonised Asians’ complete lack of understanding in the face of
Western institutions. Hong Kong abounds with such cases: when the plague bacillus was isolated there
in the early twentieth century a rumour started that Western doctors needed Chinese children’s eyes as
part of the process, unsurprisingly this caused an exodus from the colony’s schools; another example,
also related to this breakthrough in containing the plague, came from the colonial authorities’ offering of
rewards for rats that were caught and turned in for destruction, the authorities soon found the response
46 Ibid., p. 116.
47 Ibid., p. 57.
48 Ibid., p. 116.
49 Cited in Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp’s In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy,
p. 96.
50 Richard Sennett, cited in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations
and the Urban Built Environment, p. 271, footnote 3.
51 Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 27.
52 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi-
ronment, p. 30.
53 Ibid., p. 30.
66
so overwhelming that rats were suspected of having been ‘imported’ from the Chinese mainland. While
this latter example may be seen less as a case of misunderstanding than a cynical attempt to milk the
colonial authorities of cash, the point of the exercise – to reduce the number of rats in the colony – was
something the fraudsters failed to understand, paradoxically resulting in an increased danger of infection
from the increased number of rats54.
There were many conflicts between colonial authorities and Asian communities, with one of the
major sources of difficulty being the fundamental, and mutual, failure to understand what constituted
public space. Colonial authorities increasingly took on the mantle of public guardians, ‘…organizing,
maintaining, and regulating public spaces such as streets, verandahs, open spaces, parks, halls, markets,
and slaughterhouses in the interest of an abstract entity called “the public”’55. The introduction of profes-
sional policemen to Singapore in the 1830s and ’40s further controlled these public streets and places56.
Brenda S.A. Yeoh sees the emergence of a modern sense of public space, to which everyone had
the right to access, and where ‘encounters in it between individual users are unplanned and unexcep-
tional’57 also ties in to Hajer and Reijndorp’s definition of public space. This emergent public space was
not only modern, but Western, and Yeoh sees Asian communities as tending to prefer ‘…a style of land
and property use which emphasises diversity, and which is small in scale and mixed in function’58, they
tended to minimise the need for travel and maximize the versatility of individual localities. According
to Yeoh, ‘[n]o economic opportunity, however small, was scorned and niches for survival were created
wherever possible in a city where space commanded a high premium’59. In other words, the Asian city
tended to reflect a multiplicity of use and flexibility, with the juxtaposition of different activities in close
proximity to one another.
People
Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s intention in examining the effects of globalisation on the spaces of
everyday lives in Shanghai is to show how the ‘shrinking world’ phenomenon is literally reducing
space for many of the inhabitants of new global cities as they are forced to make room for re-zoning
and new infrastructure. Huang somewhat mischievously suggests that the reason so many skyscrapers
are made of glass is to fool us into thinking we can see into them, and that what goes on in them, which
should seem crystal clear, is actually opaque: the operation of global capital. The seemingly transparent
nature of the spaces of the global city is merely a mirage, and a cunning one, designed to deflect our
gaze by an architectural sleight of hand. What is really going on is the increased accommodation of
the needs and wants of the global elite (Huang’s term is ‘service class’) at the expense of other city
users. Huang’s work focuses on the interaction between urban inhabitants in three East-Asian global
cities (Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai), and she examines ‘the politics of walking as a practice and
metaphor’60. Taking the work of Shanghai writer Wang Anyi, who was dedicated to portraying the
minutiae of everyday life in the city’s alleyway houses, Huang highlights the stark gap between the
‘dazzling new look of the city’ and its old and vanishing way of life61.
Shanghai’s regaining of its former glory as a global city, with its increasing feeling of ‘being
Culture
One small but important point about life in Shanghai today is the strangely impoverished state of
its cultural climate. Just as Shanghai is building the hardware of the global city, so too it is building
the cultural hardware that one would normally expect to find in any such metropolis. The Shanghai
Museum, the Grand Theatre, and the Shanghai Library have all recently been built, and all are
impressive. Yet why is it that in a city of approximately 20 million people the number of cultural events
on any given day can barely fill one page of a daily newspaper? Why, with Shanghai’s enviable history
of cultural innovation, is the city’s arts scene so pallid?
Shanghai’s residents now enjoy more free time than ever before, the country’s central
government reduced the working week from six to five days in 199767, yet artists continue to find
Shanghai a lonely city. Perhaps China’s education system is at fault? Perhaps arts are seen as something
less important than other, more lucrative endeavours? There may well be a lack of funding for state-run
62 Ibid., p. 10.
63 Ibid., p. 134.
64 Ibid., p. 134.
65 Ibid., p. 137.
66 Ibid., p. 112.
67 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 140.
68
troupes68, but with such a global elite flooding into the city should not these cultural venues be filled
anyway? Of course, as we have seen, Shanghai is still considered a hardship posting so it simply does
not get the number of expatriates that Hong Kong and Singapore does – and both of these cities have
thriving arts scenes. Maybe Shanghai’s elite simply does not have the time? Or maybe they do not
have the inclination? Shanghai’s arts scene could hardly be characterised as cutting-edge, yet Shanghai
used to be China’s most active and influential arts hub, attracting writers, composers, directors, actors,
painters, and musicians from all over the country.
In the 1920s and ’30s it had the highest concentration of artists anywhere in the country69, it
was home to the ‘Butterfly School’ and the ‘New Saturday School’ of writers, and because Shanghai’s
foreign concessions, despite being perceived as a humiliation by some, offered China’s artists and
intellectuals conditions that did not exist anywhere else in the country, particularly when compared
with the war-torn interior of China at the time, Shanghai offered a haven of stability and freedom, one
where artists and writers were also subjected to a minimum of censorship. In fact, for some writers,
like the influential Lu Xun, Shanghai was the only place where they could get their work published70.
Shanghai also provided rich opportunities for meeting other artists; major Western figures frequently
visited the city, including, among others, Aldous Huxley, W. Somerset Maugham, and Noel Coward
(who is said to have written the play Private Lives while staying at the Cathay Hotel).
Artists and writers were also able to indulge in behaviour that would be frowned on or even
disallowed at home, such as living with a lover. Beijing’s culture at that time was known as jingpai, and
was seen to have grown stale; it found itself stuck in a dull tradition of elitism. Shanghai, on the other
hand, was seen as tolerant, modern, and popular; its culture was known as haipai71.
After 1949 Shanghai found itself cut off from international artistic influence, while at the
same time the Chinese Communist Party insisted on socialist realism for artistic expression (i.e.
propaganda). Muscular, smiling peasants toiling in the fields and factories replaced the sort of effete,
decadent characters that peopled the urbane novellas of Eileen Chang. The state further controlled
artistic endeavour by controlling access to funds, and because art was considered less important than
industry and technology artists were severely under-funded, particularly in Shanghai. According to
Pamela Yatsko, ‘[s]pending on cultural activities in Shanghai, which included education, science
and technology, and sanitation as well as culture, accounted for 1.8% to 4.4% of the total amount
invested annually in Shanghai between 1971 and 1984, compared with 16.6% just after the revolution’72.
The Shanghai authorities now recognise that they cannot portray themselves as a leading global
metropolis without a certain amount of cultural credibility, hence they have built some flagship projects,
which we have seen listed above, yet according to Pamela Yatsko this is exactly the sort of reaction one
would expect from Chinese bureaucrats used to state planning, this typically top-down approach may
not be the most conducive for cultural development. Culture is a delicate flower, as is democracy, and
civic life. All of these things depend on a growth that comes from the bottom up in order to blossom.
While Shanghai’s arts scene is suffering, Beijing’s is flourishing. Besides being the centre of the
country’s increasingly well-respected film industry, it is also home to China’s best orchestra and corps
de ballet. The city has also begun to make an international name for itself for innovation and creativity.
So why is Beijing’s arts scene so much better than Shanghai’s? The answer is simple: talent. China’s
talent flocks to the capital for the simple reason that, as Arie Graafland tells us: ‘[c]ulture tends to go
where the money goes’73, and as Beijing is where the decision makers are, it is here that the decisions
are made about what the nation’s money gets spent on. Shanghai has a long way to go if it wants to
68 Ibid., p. 140.
69 Ibid., p. 136.
70 Ibid., p. 137.
71 Ibid., p. 138.
72 Ibid., p. 139.
73 Arie Graafland (citing Edward Seidensticker) in The Socius of Architecture: Amsterdam, Tokyo, New
York, p. 139.
69
catch up with its northern neighbour, and as for any attempt to try and recreate its golden age during the
colonial heyday, that is something that may well be gone forever.
74 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 294.
75 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 12.
76 Ibid., p. 12.
77 Ibid., p. 13.
70
is particularly obvious in a city like Singapore where hermetically sealed skyscrapers are important in
keeping an interior cool through air-conditioning, which is, of course, at odds with the traditional way of
building in the region.
As for the so-called public space in front of these skyscrapers, Sennett dismisses them as ‘…an
area to move through, not be in’, and he gives us the perfect example of La Defense in Paris (with Lever
House and the Brunswick Centre)78. We can probably safely add Lujiazui to Sennett’s list. Sennett also
quotes one planner as saying that this ground is supposed to be ‘the traffic-flow-support-nexus for the
vertical whole’79, which Sennett translates into more elegant English as ‘public space has become a de-
rivative of movement’80. Interestingly, Brenda S.A. Yeoh also sees the contestation of public space in co-
lonial Singapore as stemming from this sort of problematic (although in her case the articulation of the
space is very different). The five-foot-way (veranda) at the front of the Singapore shophouse was seen
by the shopowner as being their own space to do with as they liked (i.e. sell goods), the colonial authori-
ties saw it as a public thoroughfare (i.e. the ‘traffic-flow-support-nexus’). (Of course the five-foot-way
also presents us with an interesting and peculiarly Asian problem, that of differentiating what is public
and private, something we shall be returning to later.)
So what is public space? Richard Sennett sees the word ‘public’ as having taken on its modern
meaning in early-eighteenth-century Paris and London. The sense of ‘the public’ became enlarged, it
encompassed ‘…not only a region of social life located apart from the realm of family and close friends,
but also that this public realm of acquaintances and strangers included a wide diversity of people’81. Sen-
nett sees these changes as being ‘…correlated with conditions of behaviour and terms of belief in the
18th Century [sic] cosmopolis. As the cities grew, and developed networks of sociability independent of
direct royal control, places where strangers might regularly meet grew up’82. The focus of this public life
was the capital city, with its parks, streets, and squares, all of which had been designed for the ‘special
purpose of pedestrian strolling as a form of relaxation’83. This was the era when the coffee house became
a social centre (something which Hajer and Reijndorp are also keen to point out as an excellent example
of public domain84). Theatres and opera houses became open to a wider public thanks to the sale of tick-
ets (rather than the practice of aristocratic patrons distributing places, as had formerly been the case).
Sennett sees urban amenities as being diffused to a broader spectrum of society, with even the labouring
classes beginning to adopt some of the habits of sociability, like promenading in the park, something
that had formerly been the exclusive province of the elite85. This change in the urban habits of cities like
London and Paris, had their own effect on colonial cities, particularly British and French ones, because
of course the capital city was also the metropolitan centre of empire, and was seen as the model for the
new urban forms that were being transplanted to far-flung corners of the globe.
As for the differentiation between public and private, Richard Sennett sees the line being drawn
between the claims of civility (epitomised by cosmopolitan, public behaviour) and the claims of nature
(epitomised by family life)86. Sennett maintains that these different claims were in conflict with one an-
other, and ‘the complexity of their vision lay in that they refused to prefer one over the other, but held
the two in a state of equilibrium’87. The ability to interact with strangers in an emotionally satisfying way
and yet remain aloof was seen as the means by which the human animal was transformed into a social
78 Ibid., p. 14.
79 Quoted in Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man, p. 14.
80 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p.14 .
81 Ibid., p. 17.
82 Ibid., p. 17.
83 Ibid., p. 17.
84 Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain: Analysis and Strategy, p. 84.
85 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 17.
86 Ibid., p. 18.
87 Ibid., p. 18.
71
being. As Sennett says, ‘while man made himself in public, he realised his nature in the private realm’88.
The tension between the claims of civility and the rights of nature epitomised the divide between public
and private in cosmopolitan life. As we shall see in Part IV of this thesis, there was no such bifurcation
of civil and family life in Chinese society, either in the eighteenth century or at any other time. True,
upper-class ladies would not permit themselves to be seen in public, invariably their bound feet meant
that they could not get about very much anyway – at least without some form of transport such as the
palanquin, but this tended to reflect traditional Confucian mores, this research is intended, however, to
explore the street life of Shanghai, a life invariably bereft of the sort of social niceties traditionally asso-
ciated with China’s Confucian elite.
What Richard Sennett saw emerging during the eighteenth and nineteenth century was an ero-
sion of the will to control and shape public order, people sought to shield themselves from it, with the
family as one of its principal refuges; it also gradually became the ‘moral yardstick with which to mea-
sure the public realm’ (a realm which was often found wanting)89. By the mid-nineteenth century – the
era of the flâneur – Sennett saw a pattern of behaviour begin to emerge in Western cities where strangers
lost the right to speak to one another; this right which was then replaced with another: the right to be left
alone. This he says was unlike the London and Paris of a century before, and is unlike any other city in
most of the non-Western world today. Sennett is at pains to point out that ‘…public life did not begin in
the 18th century; rather, a modern version of it took form…’90, and it is this paradox of visibility and iso-
lation which today contributes so much to what is wrong with modern public life, this very paradoxical
interplay of the visible yet inaccessible world of the glass skyscraper, and the public space in front of it
that is designed for anything but public interaction.
It might be interesting to start this chapter with a startling example of life in twenty-first-century Shang-
hai: the boarding kindergarten. Shanghai’s new middle class wants the best for its children, and with
only one child per family – and with both parents often out at work all day – one way of ensuring proper
care is to use professionals. In the traditional Chinese family, grandparents used to take care of the chil-
dren, China’s one-child policy has altered this. We have already seen the problems of China’s gender
imbalance, as well as the looming problem of the country’s ageing population, however a sophisticated
city like Shanghai had thrown up its own unique spin on these problems. Parents want to see their chil-
dren (or child) succeed, and one way of ensuring this is to send them to a boarding kindergarten. The
rationale is twofold: one, it is often a shortcut to getting a child into one of the city’s better schools, and
thence onto a better university, and a better life, etc., but the second reason is more startling, and poi-
gnant. In a country where all children are increasingly only children, the concern of parents is that they
might be inclined to be over indulged, rearing what the Chinese call ‘little emperors’. Boarding kinder-
garten give a child the opportunity to interact with other children, even if only in play.
Pamela Yatsko interviewed one mother who was happy to see her child as ‘…part of a team,
surrounded by children who are all the same age. No one will spoil him. It is good for him to develop a
healthy temperament and learn how to deal with teammates’1. Shanghai’s parents are demonstrating love
and devotion by sending their children away at so tender an age. Of course there is a more practical con-
sideration: if the child grows to be successful they will better able to help their parents in their old age.
Unfortunately many of these children will end up having to care for not just two parents but also four
grandparents as well.
The pressure to succeed begins early in a city like Shanghai, some children simply cannot cope.
Pamela Yatsko cites doctors in Shanghai as diagnosing increasing numbers of young patients with ner-
vous tics, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and other ‘mild’ mental conditions2. One other factor com-
pounding these children’s problems is the fact that their middle-class parents now tend to live in apart-
ment complexes in outlying areas, often gated, so unless there happen to be other children of a similar
age to play with they will be left to their own devices. One of the main advantages of life in the old
alleyway houses was that they acted as a sort of social safety net, with plenty of elderly neighbours only
too willing to look after a neighbour’s child. This was
the sort of street life exemplified by Jane Jacobs’ as
a ‘healthy sidewalk’. Sadly, as a way of life it is now
vanishing in Shanghai.
1 Quoted in Pamela Yatsko’s New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 112.
2 Ibid., p. 112.
73
an everyday event that is all about the ordinary lives of the people of Shanghai, but one which is also
extraordinary, because of what it managed to engender for the city, and its people: the rich, diverse, and
encounter-filled public spaces of the colonial-era. First of all it is essential to explain the usage of the
term ‘alleyway house’, which has been chosen in an effort to try and clarify the numerous and confusing
terms currently in use; there are at least seven: longtang, nongtang,
lilong, linong, lilongtang, linongtang, and shikumen.
Michelle Tsung-yi Huang says that ‘the Shanghainese call
lilong, their characteristic residential design, as longtang. “Long”
means alley or lane and “tang” parlor or hall’3. This is confusing,
and Huang does not help matters by stating that in her ‘following
discussion, lilong or longtang is sometimes referred to as
alley houses’4. Huang is, presumably, a native Chinese speaker, so
to her the Chinese terms would perhaps be clearer than to a West-
ern reader. Peter G. Rowe states that ‘the terms nong, nontang and
longtang are mainly used in Shanghai, as different expressions of
“lane” or “alley”, instead of xiang in southern China and hutong
in the north’5. While this is somewhat clearer, at least to a West-
erner, we find ourselves presented with yet another set of terms.
Added to this is the confusion with the word shikumen, which
is also sometimes used. In fact a shikumen is a specific type of
Figure 12. Shikumen, Wenmiao house, usually two-storey, and L-shaped in plan, the front of which
Road, Old Chinese City (source: consists of a small courtyard fronted by a high wall into which is
author photograph) set an elaborately carved gate, hence the name: shi-ku-men which
transliterates into English as stone-arch-gate (or -door). The Chi-
nese character men, which can mean either gate or door, in fact denotes any method of ingress, or even
simply a threshold, much like the Greek chora6.
The alleyway house was a nineteenth-century commercial development. Peter G. Rowe identi-
fies them as being ‘[b]roadly synchronous with the urban development of the foreign concessions…’7.
They were a hybrid of the traditional Chinese courtyard house, the siheyuen, and the Western-style
terrace. Most were speculative real-estate ventures and consisted of large blocks, typical of inner-city
Shanghai (and other Chinese cities), which were divided into three or four smaller blocks and developed
separately. According to Rowe, each venture was approximately 100 dwelling units. The main alleyway
was usually four to five metres wide and invariably ran perpendicularly to the access street; in larger
compounds smaller alleyways crossed this main one at right angles. The alleyways led to individual
residences, with some commercial activity located along the boundary streets, although some informal
commercial activity also occurred at the internal crossings. The houses themselves were usually two
to four storeys in height and varied in size and opulence, with basic units of anything from 60 to 105
square metres, typically with two rooms per floor8. As the typology developed, the basic house type
grew larger and more elaborate, with the New Lilong, which resembled a European townhouse, and the
Garden Lilong, which had space on either side, and which sat on a larger plot of land9. Access to the
3 Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong
Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 160, endnote 4 (chapter 5).
4 Ibid., p. 160, endnote 4 (chapter 5).
5 Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, pp. 209-210, endnote 53 (chapter
four).
6 The word men also features in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which takes its name from the Forbidden
City’s Gate of Heavenly Peace (tian: heaven, an: peace, men: gate).
7 Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 123.
8 Ibid., pp. 123-124.
9 Ibid., p. 124.
74
main alleyway was via a gate, usually left open during the day, but which invariably causes a moment’s
hesitation before entering; and as many of these alleyways are dead-ends they are generally only used
by shortcuts by people who know them well.
The alleyways were home to a variety of communal activities, from work to play, and the chief
factor in their flexibility of use was the hierarchical system of graduated privacy they afforded. Mov-
ing from the main street (which was fully public) into a private home required a movement through a
sequence of spaces that consisted of the main alleyway (which was semi-public) to the smaller, cross-
ing alleyways (which were semi-private),
before finally entering the actual privacy
of the home. This graduated sequence of
privacy determined the sort of activity that
took place on the alleyways, for example, a
fruit-seller might set up a stall at the cross-
ing of the main and side alleyways, but they
would stand on the main one, never on the
smaller, semi-private ones. An elderly Chi-
nese man or woman might sit out during the
evening to watch the activity on the street,
but they would always sit in the smaller side
alleyway, where they could watch the main
alleyway and yet not be in the way. These
smaller alleyways were also where people
Figure 13. Alleyway House, Jing An Villa, main alleyway would play mah-jong, or sit and chat, hang
(source: author photograph) out washing, repair motorcycles, look after
children, cook and wash, or tend minia-
ture gardens; while the main alleyway was
where they could buy things and salute passing acquaintances. These activities can at first glance seem
random, even haphazard, yet they actually follow a rigid and logical system of hierarchy, one that is not
always apparent to a Western eye, and one that is very reminiscent of Jane Jacobs’s organised complex-
ity.
One other function these alleyways provided, especially the semi-private ones, was the fact that
they guarded the approach to the private houses. Doors could be left open because while no one would
(probably) challenge a visitor if they were simply passing through the main alleyway, they could be
carefully watched to ensure they did not go where they did not belong. This is a benign and effective
method of allowing residents to control and manage their contact with visitors and strangers, and as will
be pointed out in Part III, exemplifies the positive role surveillance can play in a well-regulated society.
This subtle system of graduated privacy is typically Chinese and follows the pattern set out by
the siheyuen. Though forms may vary of this traditional courtyard house typology, there is a remarkable
degree of similarity in China’s traditional dwellings, urban and rural (which we shall also see in Part
IV). It is probably also important to mention Beijing’s hutong. Peter G. Rowe has pointed out that these
are similar to the courtyard houses of Wuhan and Guangzhou (where they are called xiangzi10), typically
hutong blocks in inner-city Beijing are also four to five hectares, traditionally composed of siheyuan –
in this case single-storey houses arranged around a central courtyard (wealthier households might have
more than one courtyard). Access was via a gate from the narrow laneway, which typically ran east to
west between wider streets and roadways. Here again we see the graduated privacy so typical of Chinese
home life, from public street, to semi-public laneway, to semi-private courtyard (where family members
would interact), to the private pavilions of the different members of the household.
Another consequence of the distinctive way of life afforded by the alleyway house, which we
10 Ibid., p. 123.
75
have also seen highlighted by Rowe, is that ‘…distinctions between community and privacy are less
sharply drawn than, say, in the US or Europe, often with a corresponding blurring of public, semi-
public, semi-private and private spatial realms and a stronger social emphasis on communality, propri-
ety and conformance’11. The Chinese still seem to live on their streets to a much greater extent than do
Westerners, and the subtle progression from public through semi-public/semi-private to private that took
place in the alleyways between the houses ideally
suited their lifestyle. It acted as a wonderful generator
of social life, where, according to Rowe, ‘…residents
could control and monitor their contact with visitors
and strangers’12. This blurring of public and private,
indoor and outdoor, is unknown in the West – coming
as we have seen from traditional practices of house
building in Asia, as well as from the feng shui that
underpins these practices, which we will also be ex-
amining in Part IV in exploring what constitutes the
Chinese mentalité and what has allowed it to engender
such a rich and nuanced use of public space.
As mentioned earlier, the Shanghai alleyway
house may have resembled some of its precursors
in the Chinese tradition, but it was and remains a
typology unique to the city. Shanghai was a place
where East and West met, hence new and hybrid forms
could be expected to develop (much like the creative
hybridity that resulted in Singapore’s black-and-white
bungalow). The Shanghai alleyway house has a more
or less traditional Chinese footprint, but this has been
extruded upwards thanks to the pressure on space
Figure 14. Alleyway House, Jing An Villa, side and the high value of land in the city. Its architectural
alleyway (source: author photograph) expression certainly owes more to the West than the
East, with jauntily applied neoclassical detailing,
however its mode of life was clearly Chinese. What is perhaps most interesting is the fact that it was not
any specific type of Chinese life, i.e. northern or southern, but was actually a new mode of existence,
one that was specifically Shanghainese. This was because it was the first time ever that people from
different parts of China had ever met in large numbers, (the civil service examinations that had been
held in Beijing for centuries can be discounted because the numbers of those attending were relatively
small, and the meetings highly ritualised, plus the people who met there all tended to be members of the
same class, the scholar gentry). The alleyway house was not just reflecting a melding of East and West,
it also reflected the exotic, and unprecedented, mixing of differing Chinese cultures.
As an urban typology Shanghai’s alleyway houses are under threat. According to Zheng Shiling,
there were 9,417 of them in Shanghai in 194913. As land values in central areas continue to soar, people
are forced to move out as their blocks becomes earmarked for redevelopment; this is something that
happened in the case of Xintiandi, which we will see in a moment. Through neglect and overcrowding
the stock of alleyway houses had become severely dilapidated and in many cases many were simply be-
yond repair. Indeed, as Peter G. Rowe has emphatically pointed out, the squalid, run-down conditions of
these houses were often seen as a reminder of a way of life that the Chinese would sooner forget. Many
of Shanghai’s citizens prefer to live in the cleaner, more comfortable, and spacious apartments that have
been built further out of the city centre. Rowe has also pointed out that recently ‘[t]he traditional prac-
11 Ibid., p. 27.
12 Ibid., p. 124.
13 Figure recorded by author in conversation with Prof. Zheng Shiling in 2006.
76
tice of housing extended families, including the elderly, have also eroded substantially in East Asia’14; in
China this is further exacerbated by the one-child policy. Rowe also reminds us that historic preserva-
tion in East-Asian cities is weak, and it is only recently that Shanghai has begun to see the tourist poten-
tial for these old blocks.
Although their numbers have significantly declined, there are still some good examples of
alleyway houses to be seen: Si Ming Chun (between Yanan and Julu Roads, west of Shanxi Road), Jing
An Villa (between Nanjing and Weihai Roads, east of Shanxi Road) and Shang Xian Fang (between Julu
and Changle Roads, east of Ruijin No 1 Road) are some of the liveliest.
Xintiandi
Recently there has been a change in the perception of Shanghai’s colonial-era stock of buildings. 400
structures and 11 districts have been identified as ‘fine historic buildings and zones’ in the city, including
the lavish villas of the former French Concession. Ted C. Fishman notes one subtle but effective change
in the city has been the decision to force owners of
these older houses to show them off, these lavish resi-
dences of Shanghai’s colonial elite were invariably
secluded behind high walls, but now railings afford
beautiful views of them15. The usefulness of archi-
tectural heritage in bringing in tourist dollars has not
been lost on the authorities, and one good example
of this increasing awareness of the city’s colonial
heritage is the redevelopment of the Xintiandi area.
Wood and Zapata have turned two blocks of alleyway
housing in the former French Concession (mostly of
the shikumen type) into a popular and attractive desti-
nation by restoring, and in some cases rebuilding, the
old houses. Their design opens up a public walkway
through these blocks to create a classic mixed-use
development which is proving popular with wealthier
locals and expatriates. The name Xintiandi means
‘new world’, from the Chinese xin for ‘new’ and tian-
di, which is made up of tian (heaven) and di (earth),
together which mean world or universe. As a name it
follows in the footsteps of places like the Great World
entertainment complex, which is located nearby and
Figure 15. Xintiandi (source: Shanghai: Ar- was a multi-story pleasure palace in the 1930s.
chitecture and Urbanism for Modern China, Yawei Chen maintains that the fact that Xin-
p.142) tiandi proved to be ‘a critical as well as commercial
hit’ was a surprise16. With hindsight, of course, the
adaptive reuse of a piece of what Chen calls ‘Shang-
hai’s historical tissue’ symbolising the meeting of East and West should have come as no surprise. ‘Xin-
tiandi [became] a popular entertainment hub in the city centre imbued [with] Shanghai’s historical and
cultural legacies’17. The reason Xintiandi is proving so popular is that the two different groups of people
who use it see it in a very different light: the foreigners think it is typically Chinese while the Chinese
see it as foreign.
14 Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 40.
15 Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 81.
16 Yawei Chen, Regeneration and Sustainable Development in China’s Transformation .
17 Ibid.
77
As an image of Old Shanghai it is undeniably successful, but it is what Peter G. Rowe would
call ‘allegedly local’18. Its glamour is both seductive and illusory, what Michelle Tsung-yi Huang would
call ‘…a phantasmagoric Old Shanghai, in the manner of a Hollywood diva like Greta Garbo, [which]
re-enchants the foreign investors and the local residents with a cosmopolitan past as not only a cultural
heritage but also the foundation for the global city’19. ‘The impulse to preserve the past is’, according to
Robert Hewison, ‘part of the impulse to preserve the self. Without knowing where we have been, it is
difficult to know where we are going’20. But it is invariably our own reinterpretations of the past that ap-
peals to us, something that is actually a brand-new construction, and like the rebuilt shikumen houses of
Xintiandi, it is basically fake.
Another interesting phenomenon is the selectiveness with which we choose what to venerate
or glamorise in the past; in Shanghai’s case this is undoubtedly the 1920s and ’30s. Michelle Tsung-yi
Huang also draws our attention to this fact when pointing out that ‘what is often evoked as unforgettable
is Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s, the time when the city was a cosmopolitan metropolis, rather
than the years between 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976’21. Ironic then, is it not, that
Xintiandi is where the Chinese Communist Party held its first meeting (in a girls’ school on Wangzhi
(now Xingye) Road in July 1921)? But such is the way of selectivity, or, to give it another name, nostal-
gia.
Nostalgia, very much like the sort of gentrification we are seeing in Xintiandi, is a sort of purg-
ing of the past, a cleansing of any hint of dirt or grime or misery, so that the newly washed and polished
past can be repackaged for the global elite, so they can sit and sip caffe lattes in peaceful contemplation
of just how pretty a city Shanghai really is.
One alarming part of this cultural cleansing is the rumour that security guards exclude shabbily
dressed locals from entering Xintiandi. This redevelopment project may be public space, but only if you
are a member of the sort of public it wants to see. This is one very clear instance of how spaces of global
capitalist accumulation are impinging on the everyday lives of those who used to call the city home.
Michelle Tsung-yi Huang sees this as ‘one of the effects of the capitalist space of globalization [which]
is to make everyone believe that this space is his or her own, regardless of the fact that the city was re-
structured based on the assumed needs of a small group of multinational service class people, the human
agents of global capital’22. In fact, this has become something of a moot point, the exclusionary practices
of security guards are no longer needed for the simple reason that people in the area no longer even try
to go there as they simply cannot afford to (they have perfectly pleasant (and cheaper) teahouses near-
by). Of course this is still an exclusion, nothing so crude as a security guard barring the way, but just as
effective.
Yawei Chen also sees this as a social justice issue, because the result of a project like Xintiandi
can only benefit a certain group of ‘up-level users rather than the original communities’23. But this is ex-
actly the sort of unevenness that often results from gentrification. Gentrification may well preserve some
of an area’s traditional houses, or at least facsimiles of them, but ironically it is the success of the Xin-
tiandi redevelopment that has meant that neighbouring communities have been forced out of their homes
due to an attendant rise in the value of the land these homes were built on. Arie Graafland has described
gentrification as the process whereby ‘the uneducated make way for more qualified residents in certain
neighborhoods of the city’24, and that is what is happening here. Ironically, once these surrounding ar-
18 Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 188.
19 Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong
Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 120.
20 Robert Hewison, quoted in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 86.
21 Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong
Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 119.
22 Ibid., p. 110.
23 Yawei Chen, Regeneration and Sustainable Development in China’s Transformation.
24 Arie Graafland, The Socius of Architecture: Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York, p. 212.
78
eas have been freed up for development many of the houses are then demolished so that other alleyway
houses can be ‘restored’ using authentic bricks. This is a singularly appropriate example of Sharon
Zukin’s plain ‘vernacular’ being appropriated by capital and transformed into a desirable ‘landscape’25.
Ackbar Abbas makes the point that preservation is not memory, he states that ‘[p]reservation
is selective and tends to exclude the dirt and pain’26. He mentions this while lamenting how much that
passes for post-coloniality in Hong Kong actually only amounts to a form of kitsch. And he is right.
Xintiandi, too, is a form of kitsch, a kitsch that may well be enjoyable to visit once in a while, even wal-
low in occasionally, but we must always be aware of the dangers of nostalgia, which is something we
shall be returning to in Part IV when looking at recent portrayals of Shanghai in film and literature. For
the moment it is enough to be aware that we should not allow ourselves to be blinkered by the pretty
kitschiness of places like Xintiandi because such selectiveness of vision can blind us the to very real fact
of the misery that is being caused to bring these places into being. According to Abbas it is this same
sort of denial that has made Hong Kong’s ‘[Kowloon] Walled City, with its traffic in drugs, prostitu-
tion, and human misery, look so glamorous’27. This infamous (and now demolished) Walled City will be
examined in Part III in relation to Michel Foucault’s work (particularly his notion of the heterotopia), it
is mentioned here merely to stress what Ackbar Abbas states when describing Kowloon Walled City (or
the Shanghai alleyway house) as really being glamorous only ‘after the fact’28.
One other small factor that should be noted when dealing with a topic such as gentrification, is
that according to Saskia Sassen ‘[h]igh-income gentrification generates a demand for goods and services
that are typically not mass-produced or sold through mass outlets’29, as such it creates specialised niches
for employment. Hence it is very far from simply being a juggernaut of mono-cultural kitschiness; such
high-income gentrification can actually result in a very different and diverse pattern of work organisa-
tion, with gourmet food stores and specialty boutiques replacing self-service supermarkets and generic
department stores. Similarly, Sassen sees high-income residences making copious use of hired mainte-
nance staff, again affording opportunities for employment that the middle-class suburban home, ‘with its
heavy input of family labor and of machinery’, simply does not lend itself to30.
Brenda S.A. Yeoh thinks that the colonial city is all too often not treated on its own terms, and
that ‘…the contemporary significance of the spatial configurations of the city for the actual habitants
who live out their habitual lives within its confines remains uninterrogated’31. She is, of course, look-
ing at ‘interrogating the reaction and strategies of the colonized’ but with such a clear genealogical link
between the colonial and the global city in Asia, as well as the similarity of the articulation of the sort of
power relations that make their presence felt there, we can see where Yeoh quotes James Akbar in main-
taining that ‘the built environment is reduced to being the product of a capitalist logic rather than an
arena of conflict between social groups which have differing vested interests in the city’32, as it applies
to both colonial and global-city models. Sadly, what is going on today is redevelopment without this
‘interrogating’ of reactions and strategies, and this lack of interrogation is resulting in exactly the sort of
kitsch that Ackbar Abbas is complaining about in Hong Kong, and exactly the sort of uncritical recon-
struction of would-be ‘authentic’ alleyway houses in Xintiandi.
Michelle Tsung-yi Huang also points out that when the former residents of an area are forced
to make way for gentrification, it is not a simple matter of ‘renting a moving truck and getting on the
25 Cited in Ackbar Abbas’s Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 88.
26 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 66.
27 Ibid., p. 66.
28 Ibid., p. 66.
29 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents, pp. 122-124.
30 Ibid., p. 122.
31 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi-
ronment, p. 9.
32 Quoted in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban
Built Environment, p. 216, footnote 2.
79
road’, she worries that ‘being uprooted from the community one has been familiar with cannot be easily
compensated for: what jackhammers and bulldozers demolish within minutes often takes generations to
build’33. Highlighting Wang Anyi’s work has been one way of glorifying the essence of life in the alley-
way house; life in all its seemingly insignificant detail. For Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, however, ‘Shang-
hai’s glamour finds its foundation in the alley houses and thus has everything to do with daily life’34.
Perhaps glamour is not quite the right word here, this reality was not really glamorous at all, not in the
usual sense of the word, but Huang’s quoting of Wang Anyi is sound enough: ‘[t]he emotional power
of alley houses lies in the sights and sounds of everyday life... It is not the power of the heroic epic, but
that of the accumulation of ordinary life. Flowing among those lines of houses is nothing grand, but as
minute as grains of sand, which can build a tower when brought together’35.
This is what these buildings are all about: the people who called them home. Cities are not build-
ings and the streets in-between them, cities are people, and their networks of interaction: social, family,
and commercial. A city’s constituent parts are, in many ways, not unlike the organs of a body that cluster
together in order to allow that organism to live. Yet such an agglomeration is much more than simply a
collection of organs – the whole exceeds the sum of its parts – that is how we maintain our human iden-
tity, or, in the case of an urban environment, the identity of a village, or a town, or a city.
Human sense perceptions enable individuals to live together and interact with one another, and
the environment. We do this within certain parameters that have been laid down for us by the limits
imposed by our human condition, but it is a condition that is in constantly undergoing evolution. Every
individual’s personality is unique, we are always more than a mere collection of traits, or instincts; we
have a personality, and that is what makes us who we are. Variously called spirit, soul, or geist, in China
it is known as qi. Any individual’s responses to a given situation can be altered, of course in the sophis-
ticated social structures that humans tend to form we are always being trained how to act and interact.
This interaction tends to follow certain rules, often the result of generations of interaction between peo-
ple and the places they inhabit. This interaction forms a symbiotic relationship which is built up between
the people and their environment, and which undergoes evolution from generation to generation.
Cities, too, are formed out of networks of interaction. They are formed in space, and time, by
humans interacting with one another. The environment these people find themselves born into, and the
products they produce (in this case, cities) are as much removed from being a mere summing-up of in-
teractions, as the parts that go into making of a human being exceed being a mere sum of its parts. What
lifts them above this mere summing-up can perhaps best be described by analogy. Take the example of a
bird in flight. One bird flying through the air is very much like a human travelling through a given envi-
ronment. When two birds fly together the pattern of interaction becomes more complex, with more birds
it becomes staggeringly beautiful: geese flying in V-formation heading south for the winter; flocks of
starlings and swallows swooping and diving. Their motion may seem to the casual observer to be com-
pletely random, chaotic even, and yet they never falter, never crash into one another. Their behaviour is
exquisitely complex and yet it is premised on two very simple rules: one, stay close together, and two,
do not hit one another.
In a similar way human beings will gather together based on equally simple rules, initially club-
bing together to hunt and gather, now we club together to live in cities, in each case, like the birds in
flight, the underlying principles are startlingly basic. We are territorial creatures and city life, in fact
nearly all human life, is premised on the right to property. In the West this was such a basic assump-
tion that when Europeans began their voyages of discovery at the end of the Middle Ages they came
in contact with hunter-gatherers (for example, the nomads of the North-American plains) they thought
they were not making full and proper use of their lands and so took it from them, enclosing livestock,
33 Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong
Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 114.
34 Ibid., p. 122.
35 Wang Anyi, quoted in Michelle Tsung-yi Huang’s Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers: Illusions of
Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, p. 122.
80
farming intensively, in other words, colonising. It is to colonisation that we shall next turn our attention,
particularly in comparing it to its later, and more devastating development, imperialism.
Finally, to reiterate, cities are not about buildings and streets, cities are about people and their
networks of interaction. The changes we are seeing to the way of life in Shanghai’s alleyway houses is
less about changes in buildings’ uses due to the forces of global capitalism, but more about the changes
being wrought in Chinese society by, among other things, the one-child policy. It is not the buildings, no
matter how superficially pretty these may be, that are interesting, it is the way of life they engendered,
and which they in turn were engendered by, thanks to the symbiotic system human beings have devel-
oped with their environment.
As we have seen, this way of life can be likened to the pattern birds make when they flock, re-
markably beautiful to see, but, like the birds, done for a specific and practical purpose – any beauty it
may have is a sort of by-product of this process, a bonus.
In Shanghai today, without the extended family and the tradition of social and community life it
entailed, what future can there really be for the alleyway house? There hardly seems any point in retain-
ing them just so that international chains of coffee shops can have interesting-looking outlets for the
local and international global elite to sit and chat in their urban glamour zone. Xintiandi is preserving
nothing more than a shell – an interesting and attractive one, but a shell nonetheless – the life that once
made these places really interesting is gone, perhaps forever. Maybe Western-style apartment living will
actually be more conducive to China’s forced nuclear families; alleyway houses that face out onto empty
alleyways seem rather pointless, except perhaps to highlight the rapidity with which things are changing
in the new China.
81
Conclusion to Part I
Shanghai’s intention to turn itself into the New York of Asia is not succeeding; with no hint of dispar-
agement this research has suggested that the city might try to become the Chicago of Asia instead. Part I
has examined Saskia Sassen’s notion of the ‘global city’, showing how it functions as part of a network,
a network that requires face-to-face contact, and one whose links have tended to form themselves where
older and more established networks are already in place. Technologies, even new ones such as fibre-op-
tics, tend to follow existing infrastructure lines, such as railways, waterways, and roads, which were set
up during the colonial era. Manuel Castells’s ‘network society’ was also examined, where globalisation
was seen as nothing new per se, and yet has managed to result in a qualitative social and economic
change because it operates in real time.
Putting Sassen’s and Castells’s terms together resulted in the ‘global city network’, the rubric
under which Shanghai was examined. One interesting fact is that the new global elites in a city such as
Shanghai tend to live very much like the former colonial elites; and their needs are pushing people who
are unable to access this brave new world of instantaneous technology into what Manuel Castells calls
the ‘Fourth World’ – and what this research calls the ‘analogue archipelago’.
Globalisation is not necessarily Westernisation, and there is a strong neo-Confucian element un-
derpinning China’s recent resurgence. This has important ramifications for how Chinese people perceive
public space. The downside of China’s rapid economic development includes rural-to-urban migration,
which has resulted in a vast ‘floating population’ of people who find themselves stuck in this analogue
archipelago, yet even for those who have done well under ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ there
are burgeoning problems, such as an ageing population and an increasingly stark gender imbalance.
Shanghai’s new public space is curiously dead, giving the lie to the term ‘public’ as understood
in the West. Asians tend to blur distinctions between public and private, which can render their spaces
hard to read for Westerners. The fault with some of Shanghai’s new public space is that it is ‘left over’
space, particularly in front of the new skyscrapers. This is space that has been designed for movement
not for use, and is the sort of space that contrasts so starkly with that of the traditional alleyway house,
where communal activity, graduated privacy, and organised complexity render it so rich and vibrant.
Gentrification projects such as Xintiandi have only managed to preserve a shell of what was once a
vibrant way of life, the nostalgia of projects such as these can often blind people to the fact that in
preparing the way for them developers can destroy in minutes what has taken generations to build.
82
PART II
COLONIALISM
This section looks at colonialism in an effort to understand what this term has meant for a city like
Shanghai, it also explores what sort of a colony Shanghai actually was, if it was a colony at all (in the
normal understanding of the word). It also differentiates colonialism from its later and more insidious
incarnation, imperialism. Taking as its point of departure the two empires that have had the most influ-
ence on the city, namely the British and the French, it examines how both of these countries’ ‘civilising
missions’ have left their stamp on a good portion of the globe, particularly as they expanded rapidly be-
tween 1871 and 1914. These influences can still be felt in Shanghai today by having set their seal on the
city’s streets and architecture.
This section also examines the colonial histories of Shanghai’s regional competitors in the new
global economy, Hong Kong and Singapore, to see how their erstwhile colonial heritage – in this case
the British – has enabled them to embrace global capitalism so successfully, and also, from a practical
point of view, how Shanghai’s efforts in this direction can compare with them, as well as to see if there
are any lessons the city can learn from these, its better-developed East-Asian neighbours.
83
1 COLONIAL SHANGHAI
China was never fully colonised by any imperial power, however, during the nineteenth century its sta-
tus became known as semi-colonial. The coastal and riparian toeholds of the Treaty Ports were valuable
sources of revenue for the imperial powers, even if they failed to act as the bridgeheads of empire they
were so clearly intended to be. The only great power that made its presence felt in any major way was
Japan, at least in terms of territorial expansion, however Japan’s influence was also the last in coming
and the shortest lived, barely a half-century, compared with Britain’s century and a half, and Portugal’s
four hundred years in Macau. Semi-colonial or not, this period is still seen by China as one of the low-
est points in its long history, with the
coastal colonies and Treaty Ports still
perceived as a lasting national wound.
In 1949 when Mao Zedong and
the People’s Liberation Army finally
defeated Chiang Kai-shek and the Na-
tionalists, the end of what was in effect
a civil war was seen, and has been por-
trayed ever since, as the end of an era
of foreign aggression. The era of colo-
nialism (semi- or otherwise) was over.
China had finally been liberated.
Shanghai was, at that time, a
unique urban entity. As a city it had
consisted of three separate jurisdic-
Figure 16. Shanghai in 1930 (source: Shanghai 1842-1949: tions: the Anglo-American Interna-
The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p.xiii) tional Settlement (which was in effect
self-governing), the French Concession
(a French colony governed from Hanoi), and a Chinese city (consisting of an ancient city and newer
suburbs). We have seen the staggering pace of change in the city since 1990 when Pudong was desig-
nated a Special Economic Zone, now it might be useful to turn our attention to the history of the city, the
better to understand what is happening there today.
For the century and a half after Britain defeated China in the First Opium War (1839-42) the cur-
rents of change in China were more visible in Shanghai than anywhere else in the country. As we have
seen the word ‘modern’ was first transliterated into Chinese here. Shanghai became known as the Paris
of the East and was without doubt the greatest city in Asia until 1949. To the traditional-minded Chinese
the city was a den of iniquity bereft of any of the Confucian virtues, but to the Shanghainese, and the
foreigners who came here, it was the epitome of modernity. Shanghai was a city of firsts in China: it had
the first electric tram, the first stock market, the first night club, the first movie industry. It also had the
country’s tallest buildings, its largest population, the freest press, and the best social life, not to mention
the country’s most dangerous gangsters, sultriest prostitutes, and the worst drug and gambling problems.
Shanghai became East Asia’s most important commercial centre due to a number of
interconnected factors, not least of which was the simple matter of geographical location: halfway up
the China coast and at the mouth of the Yangtze River, which made it the ideal conduit for China’s
trade. Britain’s laissez-faire approach to business set the tone for the colony, which meant that the city’s
taipans were free to run things as they saw fit. This freedom to manoeuvre was backed by the rule of
law (Western law), and, if necessary, force of arms to make sure that these laws were imposed. Shang-
hai’s city centre has a Western footprint, and, unlike other postcolonial cities, this footprint is still very
much in evidence today. Shanghai’s remarkably intact colonial core is due in part to the dearth of devel-
opment between 1949 and 1990, and also the fact that when it finally woke from its slumbers it opted to
develop the Pudong district, leaving the Puxi side alone.
84
Shanghai was home to three million people in 1930, 2.85 million of them were Chinese. This
was, as we have seen in Part I, the first time that Chinese from different provinces were able to mix
together in any great numbers in China. These vast numbers were governed by a tiny colonial elite
who saw themselves as very much separate from the native population, in fact they even differentiated
between a ‘Shanghailander’ (a foreigner) and a ‘Shanghainese’ (a native Chinese). Few, if any, of
Shanghai’s colonists ever bothered to learn any dialect of Chinese. Pidgin, an execrable mix of English
words with Chinese grammar, was the most they could ever manage. Most people communicated with
their Chinese staff via a head servant (known as the ‘number one boy’). Some phrases of pidgin-English
have made it into daily use in the West, such as ‘can do’, ‘chop chop’, and ‘look-see’.
These colonists had no interest whatsoever in socialising with the vast majority of the city’s Chi-
nese population, in fact some maps of the city even as late as the twentieth century invariably left the
old Chinese City blank, as if assuming that no right-thinking person would even want to go there. The
colonial elite preferred to stay within the Foreign Concessions, where they built for themselves impres-
sive homes, all in Western styles, and often elaborate. There was everything from the French chateau
to the Spanish hacienda, as well as numerous half-timbered Tudor mansions. The colonists also built
the icons for which Shanghai was to become so famous: the neoclassical and Art Deco banks and office
buildings that line the Bund, Nanjing and Huaihai Roads (Nanking Road and Avenue Joffre as they were
known at the time).
Then came 1949 and Shanghai slumbered, or so it seemed. Actually, apart from a depressed
period in the 1980s, Shanghai continued to grow economically, as we have seen in Part I, the city was
regarded as a state-planning paragon by the Chinese Communist Party, the reason its infrastructure and
building stock failed to develop during this period is because the city’s earnings were being used by the
central government to fund development elsewhere in the country.
As Pamela Yatsko has perceptively pointed out, ‘[i]f Guangzhou or Beijing were to announce
their intention to become China’s and the region’s financial capital, their lack of such an illustrious
background would prevent them from being taken as seriously’1. Shanghai made it clear in the 1990s
that it was trying to become the New York of Asia, as has been seen in Part I this is not likely to
happen any time soon (if at all), and, as was also pointed out in Part I, perhaps Chicago might a better
aspiration. Chicago’s business and cultural life, while not intending to disparage that city’s reputation in
these areas, can hardly compare to New York’s, but as the birthplace of new and innovative architectural
typologies such as the skyscraper (and the works of Frank Lloyd Wright) might it not make a more
appropriate comparison to Shanghai’s own innovations, with its tall buildings and the alleyway house?
Also, both cities have a something of a similarly mythologised past, particularly the gangster-
ridden 1920s: Al Capone and the St Valentine’s Day massacre seem to resonate with Shanghai’s Green
Gang and the larger-than life character of its leader, Big-eared Wu. Both of these cites found themselves
prey to gangsters because of substances that had been enjoyed by large numbers of people until they
suddenly became prohibited: the Volstead Act forbade alcohol consumption in the United States during
the 1920s, turning millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals simply because they liked
the odd glass of wine, or that fashionable new concoction, the cocktail; while opium, admittedly a more
pernicious habit (though probably less socially damaging, as opium-eaters tend not to rampage in the
way that drunken people often do) was finally made illegal in China in 1917.
Pre-colonial Shanghai
The name Shanghai is usually transliterated into English as ‘above the sea’, which is based on the sim-
plest reading of the character shang as meaning ‘above’ (as opposed to ‘below’: xia). Shang can also
mean to start or a beginning, as in to begin a lesson or a class, so Shanghai could also be seen as the
place where the sea starts, or where the landmass of China ends – the character hai is less open to in-
1 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 57.
85
terpretation, simply meaning a large body of water such as the sea or the ocean; the Pacific is known as
dahai, or ‘great ocean’. This makes even more sense when seen against the Chinese name for China,
which is Zhongguo, which means ‘middle country’, so the sea can be seen as the place where the coun-
try ends.
Chinese names do tend to be very straightforwardly descriptive, and frequently make use of geo-
graphical features such as mountains, rivers, lakes, etc, as well as the cardinal points (of which there are
five in Chinese reckoning: north, south, east, west, and centre). Places like Shandong and Shanxi, liter-
ally mean ‘east’ and ‘west of the mountains’
respectively, and we have already seen the
Chinese terms for east and west being used in
Shanghai, where the old colonial core, to the
west of the Hunagpo River is called ‘Puxi’,
and the new area to its east, ‘Pudong’. Beijing
and Nanjing have similarly opposing geo-
graphical indications, meaning ‘northern’ and
‘southern capital’ respectively (while Tokyo is
known as Dongjing, or ‘eastern capital’). So
while the usual transliteration of Shanghai as
‘above the sea’ is a perfectly clear name, and
is not wrong, it might be preferable to think of
it as the place where the ocean begins; which
captures more the nuance of the place name
Figure 17. Pre-colonial Shanghai (source: Building as it would have been used by the Chinese
Shanghai: The Story of China’s Gateway, p.20) who came here down the Yangtze River. (This
point will be gone into in greater detail in Part
IV when investigating the way in which the
Chinese use names and language, mention of it has been made here simply to raise awareness of it as an
issue, and to adumbrate the later analysis with a timely and practical example.)
Shanghai as a town had existed as early as the tenth century CE, before which time it was a fish-
ing village called Hu Tu, (after the hu, or bamboo stakes, that fishermen sank into the mud to anchor
their nets)2. It seems to have become known as Shanghai around the time of the Song Dynasty (960-
1120 CE), by which time the fishing village had grown into a busy market town. By the sixteenth cen-
tury it was a walled city of regional importance, and a major port for China’s busy coastal junk trade3.
The Japanese were the first foreign nation to trade with China, and it was the activity of their
pirates that forced the Shanghainese to build their city walls. Approximately five-and-a-half kilometres
in length (three-and-a-half miles) the circular walls4 were still standing as late as 1912. What is most
interesting about these walls is that they actually describe a circle, or an oval, which is unusual as most
important Chinese cities are square in plan. Ana Moya Pellitero cites The Rituals of Zhou as determin-
ing the principles of imperial city planning as early as the first millennium BCE, where cities were con-
structed in the shape of a square, with three gates in each wall and three arteries connected these gates
orthogonally. The city was formed of a series of concentric walled compounds following a clear social
hierarchy, with the Imperial City at the centre, surrounded by an administrative or Inner City, which was
in turn surrounded by an Outer City; this she sees as mirroring the division of the universe into three
levels which symbolised what she calls ‘the moralist division of Chinese society into the emperor, schol-
ar-administrators, and commoners’5. The Inner City was occupied by the privileged officials and gen-
2 Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 12.
3 Ibid., p. 12.
4 Ibid., pp. 12-13.
5 Ana Moya Pellitero, The Image of the Urban Landscape: The re-discovery of the city through different
spaces of perception, p. 243.
86
try, whose homes would have followed the traditional courtyard-house pattern we have seen mentioned
earlier, while the commercial functions were placed in the Outer City, as far from the centre of power as
possible, where people lived in simpler shophouse-type structures. Merchants were tolerated as a neces-
sary evil in Confucian society and tended to be treated as second-class citizens according to Pellitero. It
could even be suggested that merchants were actually treated as fourth-class citizens, because traditional
Confucianism society was divided into four classes: scholars, peasants, craftsmen, and merchants (in de-
scending order of importance).
Shanghai was a market town that had expanded from a fishing settlement, as such it would have
had no symbolic need to be constructed along the lines highlighted by Pellitero as bein laid down in The
Rituals of Zhou. Pellitero also makes it abundantly clear that Chinese cities were administrative centres
not commercial ones; commerce was merely tolerated as a necessary evil, certainly it was very far from
being the main aim of urban centres. This would certainly help to explain the circular form of Shang-
hai’s city walls, as opposed to the more traditional square-shape we would normally associate with a
Chinese settlement6.
In fact it was Shanghai’s success as a commercial centre that first drew it to the attention of the
Western powers, particularly Britain, who wanted a share in the lucrative trade in tea, porcelain, silk,
and cotton. Shanghai’s entrepot function later gained it the nickname ‘Gateway to the Celestial Empire’,
but up to the 1840s China’s control of this trade was causing a dangerous imbalance between it and
the Western powers, particularly Britain (which had taken to drinking tea more than most), in fact this
trade imbalance was so bad that it was in danger of bankrupting the country so Britain decided to im-
port something more profitable, notoriously deciding on Bengali opium. When the Governor of Canton
(Canton was Britain’s toehold in China up to 1842) ordered stocks of the drug to be destroyed the Brit-
ish retaliated in the action that became known to history as the First Opium War (1839-42). This resulted
in a humiliating defeat for the Chinese, and the Treaty of Nanking (now Nanjing), which ended the war,
opened up five cities to international trade, thenceforth known as ‘treaty ports’, this treaty also allowed
Britain to establish colonies at Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Colonial Shanghai
Under the terms of the Treaty of Nanking, Shanghai came into being as a Western entity on 29 August
1842. Earlier that year, on 11 June, a flotilla of British gunboats, led by the Nemesis, sailed into the
Yangtze estuary and opened fire on the
fortifications that guarded Shanghai, the
city fell with barely any resistance; three
weeks later the invaders were at Nanking
(Nanjing) and Peking (Beijing) found
itself forced to surrender. The Treaty
opened up Shanghai, and four other ports,
to British trade and residence. Britain also
enjoyed ‘most favoured nation’ status,
which entitled it to a number of privileges,
Figure 18. Shanghai’s colonial growth (source: author the main one being ‘extra-territoriality’,
drawing) usually called ‘extrality’ for short, which
meant that British citizens were exempt
from Chinese law (being in theory subject
to their own at home). From the moment it became a treaty port, Shanghai supplanted Canton (Guang-
zhou) as China’s leading entrepot. Shanghai’s potential as the gateway to China had been recognised by
British merchants as early as 1832 when the British East India Company had dispatched a warship from
6 I am grateful to Ana Moya Pellitero for first drawing this fact to my attention.
87
Canton to reconnoitre. The city also enjoyed a more temperate climate than Canton (lying on the same
latitude as New Orleans and Cairo), so it only really became uncomfortably hot in the summer. It also
had four seasons, sometimes with snow in winter. One other advantage was that the Shanghainese were
considered amiable and peace-loving,
in contrast to the vicious and hostile
Cantonese.
The first British merchants
arrived in 1843. They were given 56
hectares (140 acres) on the foreshore
north of the Chinese city which be-
came known as the British Settle-
ment7, the population of which did
not exceed 100 until 18488. The
Americans established an unofficial
settlement north of the British at the
same time, on the other side of the
Suzhou River (or Soochow Creek as it
was then known). Running along the
Figure 19. Shanghai’s colonial growth superimposed on current Huangpo River’s western bank, the
city (source: Taeke de Jong) British settlement’s foreshore was lit-
tle more than a muddy towpath where
coolies had pulled the city’s grain
junks. This towpath or, to give it the traditional British colonial term for a waterfront, bund (from the
Hindi), would later become one of the world’s most famous waterfronts, with the highest skyline east of
Suez9. At first there was a sort of no-man’s-land between the British settlement and the old Chinese city,
but then the French arrived in 1849 and squeezed themselves into this leftover space.
From the very beginning Shanghai experienced remarkable growth, with every part of the city
increasing steadily in size until World War II. The city’s morphological growth reflected the geopolitical
situation of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact the city grew in eight incremental stag-
es, or at least the colonial parts of it did, with a ninth stage being disallowed by the Chinese authorities
(the 1909 plan to extend the International Settlement’s northern boundary to follow the line of latitude:
31 degrees north).
The Second Opium War (1856-60), also known as the Arrow War, was a joint French and British
expedition, and it ended in another humiliating defeat for China. The British and French added insult to
injury by burning down the Chinese Emperor’s Summer Palace outside Peking. The Treaty of Tientsin,
which ended this war, was ratified at the end of 1860 and opened the Yangtze River to Western trade, it
also forced the Chinese government to allow tariffs on the importation of opium – effectively legalising
the drug trade – stocks of the drug were now allowed to be stored on a pair of old sailing hulks moored
at Shanghai’s Bund. Opium dens, known as ‘divans’ proliferated, particularly in Shanghai, and a habit
which had long been regarded as a vice of the upper classes rapidly spread to every level of society, with
devastating social consequences. Shanghai, the Paris of the East, had earned itself another nickname: the
‘Whore of Asia’.
Opium was far from the city’s only source of wealth, however, the American Civil War (1861-
65) had cut off Europe’s supply of cotton, with a resulting boom for China. And with the Yangtze River
7 Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 10 (although in another of her books,
Shanghai: Gateway to the Celestial Empire, 1860-1949, Dong states that the British were given 43 acres (on p.
9); it is generally accepted that the figure of 140 acres is the correct one).
8 Ibid., p. 11.
9 For an example of another British-colonial use of the term ‘bund’, see Agatha Christie’s They Came to
Baghdad: ‘His eyes, unfocused in a wide stare, looked out blearily over the river bund’, p. 43.
88
finally opened to international trade (which the British, despite the methods they used to impose it, quite
without irony insisted on calling ‘free trade’), Shanghai’s customs revenues soared, tripling in the first
year alone10. Property speculation also made many people rich, the cost of an acre went from about 50
pounds in 1850 to 20,000 by 186211. The Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), which was causing major havoc
in China in the late 1850s, meant that Shanghai saw an influx of people fleeing the terror; as many as
300,000 newcomers flooded in, making it, according to Stella Dong, ‘the fastest growing city in the
world, fast than any of the other boomtowns such as San Francisco, Chicago, or Melbourne’12. By the
early 1860s Shanghai’s port was the world’s sixth-largest13.
With rapid growth fuelling the frenzied property speculation, not to mention the existence of
four different enclaves (Chinese, British, American, and French), there was no overall plan for the city.
Development was haphazard to say the least. Then in 1863 the Shanghai Municipal Council was set up
to administer the British and American Settlements, which amalgamated to become the International
Settlement. The French Concession briefly joined them but then opted out, preferring to remain under
French colonial administration from Hanoi14. Shanghai was thus located at the nexus of different im-
perial ambitions: the British, American, and French had consolidated their positions, and backed their
claims by force of arms when necessary. Elsewhere in China, the Russians and Germans were doing the
same.
Shanghai could well be described as an ‘interface of empire’ during this period, with the great
powers vying with each other in much the same way as they did in the rest of the world, from the Amer-
icas, to Africa, and the rest of Asia. By the 1890s, China was being seen as the next Africa (which had
been divided up by the Western powers in their ‘scramble’ the previous decade). The pickings were go-
ing to be rich when China’s seemingly inevitable collapse finally came about.
China, however, was not Africa, it was a unified and ancient country, one which was finding it
hard to adjust to the new world, a world where Western powers were in the ascendant. But it had a re-
silience that proved surprising to its would-be conquerors. However, it was weak, its imperial system
was about to collapse (which it finally did in 1911), and while it tottered towards this final crisis it found
itself forced to make ever more humiliating concessions to powers that were, for a time, stronger than
they. This was the underpinning of Shanghai’s colonialism.
From 1842 Shanghai was forced to allow the British, American, and French to establish what
were known as ‘concessions’. Again, we need to look at the meaning of this word. People tend to think
of the French Concession simply as a name given to a pretty part of the city, yet the verb ‘to concede’
means to grant a right or a privilege, and in turn is related to the verb ‘to cede’, which means to give up
one’s right to, or possession of, something. (It can also mean to admit something to be true – but that is
not particularly relevant here.) Generally it denotes defeat. The Chinese may have granted the British,
Americans, and French their Concessions, but they did so reluctantly, but they were not the only ones
forced to do so. Another example would be the ‘capitulations’ that were forced upon the Ottoman Em-
pire at more or less the same time. As a word, capitulation may seem to carry even more weight than a
concession, but basically they both amounted to the same thing: humiliation at the hands of a stronger
foreign power.
Shanghai, as have seen, consisted of three different jurisdictions: Chinese, French, and the self-
governing International Settlement. Despite the potential nightmare of these different jurisdictions, the
city functioned remarkably cohesively. There was the odd colourful incident (as illustrated by Hergé in
the Tintin adventure The Blue Lotus, where criminals could evade the police by crossing from one en-
10 Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, p. 23.
11 Ibid., p. 16.
12 Ibid., p. 16.
13 Ibid., p. 18.
14 Ibid., p. 21 (although earlier in her book (p.18) Dong states that the French Concession was governed by
a consul; it very probably was, but he would most likely have been answerable to the colonial authorities in Ha-
noi).
89
clave to another), but actually the city had rather a conventional footprint, with commercial, industrial,
and residential areas all following patterns that resembled any other city (i.e. any other Western city).
Despite these three different jurisdictions, there were, in effect, no borders in Shanghai – this was not
Cold War Berlin – the old Chinese city did have some no-go areas, indeed some Western residents prob-
ably regarded the whole place as one big no-go area, but generally the city seems to have operated as a
seamless whole.
Streets at right angles to the Bund were named after Chinese cities, for example, Soochow (Su-
zhou), Peking (Beijing), Nanking (Nanjing), and Canton (Guangzhou); while those parallel to it were
named after provinces: Szechwan (Sichuan), Honan (Hunan), Shantung (Shangdong), etc. Nanjing
Road, today the city’s partially pedestrianised main shopping street, meanders through the heart of what
used to be the southern half of the International Settlement, whereas Huaihai Road (the former Avenue
Joffre) runs straight as a dye down the centre of the French Concession. Nanjing Road’s odd shape
could have resulted from Britain’s more laissez-faire attitude to town planning, but probably owes more
to the fact that it was originally two roads, running through quite different parts of the city: the former
Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road) was the main thoroughfare of the commercial heart of the colony;
while Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing West Road) was an arterial route through an upmarket residential
district. The French, having arrived later, and having to make do with what might have been considered
less desirable land, with typical panache went on to make more of it: the French Concession is today the
smartest part of town, with the most beautiful villas and apartment complexes, as well as the most ex-
clusive shops and restaurants (this is also where the Xintiandi development is located).
West of the Concessions lay an area known as the Badlands. This was actually a misnomer be-
cause this district was distinctly upmarket, with large villas peeping through the secluded shrubbery of
tree-lined streets like Xinhau Road (formerly Amherst Avenue) which is a continuation of fashionable
Huaihai Road and runs west into the Hongqiao and Gubei areas, districts popular today with expatriates,
both Asian and Western. The Badlands, as befitted its status as a notional extension of the foreign con-
cessions, was serviced by the same utilities, but the increasingly difficult political situation in the 1930s,
meant that the area’s foreign residents occasionally had to flee their homes.
As we have already seen, the two Shanghais, Western and Chinese, did not always see eye to
eye, there was even the differentiation between Shanghainese and Shanghailanders, but while the for-
eign concessions’ growth was impressive, it was as nothing compared to the Chinese city that surround-
ed them. The city’s population doubled between 1895 and 1910, and then nearly tripled by 193015. The
Chinese, under the modernising influence of the Nationalists, planned a new Civic Centre to the north
of the city in 1931, it was intended to draw attention away from the foreign concessions, and facilitate
business, as it was closer to the mouth of the Huangpo. Designed along Beaux Arts principles by Ameri-
can-educated Chinese architect Dong Dayou, it incorporated Chinese and Art Deco elements attractively
in the few (now sadly neglected) buildings that were built. It failed as a plan, principally probably due
to the Japanese invasions of 1932 and 1937, but could perhaps be seen as a precursor to the 1990’s Pu-
dong, another ambitious new plan drawing attention away from the former colonial enclaves, this time
eastwards instead of north. Which brings us back to China as the nexus of imperial ambitions. By the
end of the nineteenth century there was a new power to be reckoned with in China, and it was not one
that came from the West: it was Japan.
15 Ibid., p. 75.
16 Ibid., p. 209.
90
Great Depression, was barely felt here; land prices tripled in five years, making rents along the Bund
more expensive than the Champs Elysees or Fifth Avenue. This was the era when the rich and famous
flocked to the city. We have already seen writers such as Aldous Huxley, W. Somerset Maugham, and
Noel Coward, all of whom have written about their experiences of the city, directly or indirectly. Names
that have not perhaps remained in the first rank of celebrity over the succeeding decades include Emily
Hahn (who visited with her per gibbon, Mr Mills), Edda Ciano (Mussolini’s daughter, whose husband,
Count Ciano, was Italy’s consul-general). Others, whose fame has proved somewhat more enduring,
included Wallis Warfield Simpson (later the Duchess of Windsor) and Ho Chi Minh, who spent a year in
Shanghai (staying at the YMCA on Hankow Road) after having spent the previous twelve months mak-
ing pastries at Escoffier’s establishment in Paris (where he had been friends with Zhou En-lai)17.
This is also of course the era most often mythologised in increasingly rose-tinted portrayals of
the city’s past. With lavish re-creations by Western as well as Eastern auteurs, including Merchant Ivo-
ry’s The White Countess, Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad, and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. The nostalgia
that pervades these films is something that shall be looked at in great detail in Part IV when examining
the novel When We Were Orphans, which is by Kazuo Ishiguro (the screenwriter of the film The White
Countess), and which explores themes of loss and longing.
One theme that is touched on by the film The White Countess is the loss of prestige Westerners
suffered after the influx of stateless White Russians fleeing the Civil War that follwed the Bolshevik
Revolution. These newcomers did not enjoy the benefits of extra-territoriality (as they refused Soviet
citizenship), they were therefore subject to Chinese law. Their poverty and destitution did much to un-
dermine what Stella Dong calls ‘the prestige of the white man in China’18. They took work where they
could find it, men as bodyguards or nightclub bouncers, women (as in the case of the eponymous ‘white
countess’) as taxi dancers – often a euphemism for a prostitute. Many of them ended up as drunks and
could be seen littering the streets of the poorer parts of the city.
This was actually the second blow inflicted by Russia on ‘the prestige of the white man in Chi-
na’, the first was their defeat in their war with Japan in 1905, which we will see later in this section. The
fact that these Russians could not be sent home, as there was no ‘home’ for them to go to, was a constant
source of vexation to the colonial powers. Shanghai’s foreign communities had long operated a fund to
repatriate undesirables – destitute whites who were, according to Stella Dong, sent back home lest they
lessen their race’s prestige19.
The reason the White Russians were able to make it to Shanghai in the first place was because
the city was the only place in the world where there were no restrictions on immigrants. No visas or
documents of any kind were required to enter the city. From 1938 onwards there was also an influx of
some 20,000 European Jews20, (another of the sub-themes of The White Countess), although it has to be
said that Shanghai has always had a large and important Jewish community (often Sephardic, particular-
ly from what is modern-day Iraq). Niall Ferguson places the figure at closer to 18,000, but these ‘state-
less’ Jewish refugees, who were confined to the Hongkew area in February 1943, all managed to survive
the war, despite German pressure on Japan for their extermination21.
Such a relaxed official attitude towards visitors may have been fortunate for those fleeing Nazi
oppression in Europe, but it also made the city a haven for outlaws and adventurers. Shanghai at this
time had a reputation for criminality matched only by Chicago’s. One odd mention of Pudong during
this period is the fact that when numbers of beggars in Shanghai’s foreign concessions got out of hand,
police would round them up and ferry them across to Pudong, where they were stuck until they could
earn (or beg, or steal) enough money for the passage back to the Puxi side of the river22.
17 Ibid., p. 236.
18 Ibid., p. 132.
19 Ibid., p. 34.
20 Ibid., p. 258.
21 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 275.
22 Lynn Pan, Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise, p. 7.
91
In the 1930s, Shanghai’s International Settlement alone was home to the citizens of more than
sixty different countries23. It may have been a cosmopolitan city – what Kazuo Ishiguro calls ‘multi-
culturalism avant la lettre’24 – but it was the British, by dominating the Municipal Council, who set the
tone. By 1930, however, the Japanese formed the largest group of foreigners in the city, and had begun
to agitate for more of a say in the Settlement’s running25. The Bund had, by this time, taken on the ap-
pearance it has today, a broad and busy esplanade with muscular neoclassical and Art Deco banks and
office buildings overlooking its busy quays. Each building seemed to vie with its neighbours for gran-
deur and prestige, what Jennifer Cody Epstein likens to the ‘bickering members of some enormous
concrete clan’26. The architecture was known as ‘compradoric’, a play on the word for the robust Greek
order and the Portuguese ‘comprador’, a go-between for commercial transactions. The word ‘compra-
dor’ actually means ‘buyer’ and was used to describe Chinese or Eurasian businessman who facilitated
business between the Chinese and foreign merchants.
As we have seen, most of the rest of the interaction that took place between the races in Shang-
hai used that frightful mix of Chinese and English known as pidgin. Gore Vidal relates having dined
with the Duchess of Windsor in New York who, even though they were in a French restaurant, insisted
on saying that, ‘I did learn one sentence of Chinese after all those years out there’, then she clapped her
hands and called out to the startled waiter: ‘Champagne chop chop!’ When the waiter did not react the
Duchess confided in Vidal, ‘They do that deliberately, you know. Pretend they don’t understand perfect
Chinese’27. Admittedly Vidal has pointed out that the waiter was probably Puerto Rican and blames the
Duchess’s confusion as having resulted from one plastic surgery procedure too many (hence her brain
may not have been what it once was); as an anecdote it illustrates perfectly the sort of language, and
tone, that would have been used by a ‘white Missy’ to a Chinese subaltern in colonial Shanghai.
Pidgin, which was meant to be a means of communication between the races only served to keep
them apart. As it could never be used for any discourse more sophisticated than giving orders, and that
imperfectly, it only reinforced Westerners’ views of Chinese as stupid and shiftless people. Furthermore,
as Stella Dong tells us, ‘[t]aking a serious interest in anything Chinese was to risk the label of “going
native”’28. Young British men working at the hongs (companies), who were known as ‘griffins’ (prob-
ably a corruption of the Dutch word for a clerk: griffier) had contracts forbidding them to marry until
they had been at least five years in China. They were then expected to find a suitable wife while on
‘home leave’ as the difficulties of finding a suitable partner in a city where foreign men outnumbered
foreign women ten to one were legion.
If the foreigners had been able to communicate with the Chinese it is questionable what level of
sophistication would have been attained, Shanghai did not attract Western intellectuals, the few well-
known writers who did visit tended to make their trips short, leaving once they had gathered enough
material for the play or short story or reportage they were working on. Stella Dong describes the city
as ‘convivial rather than cultural’, reporting that the Shanghai Club spent $72 on its library in the year
1870 (compared to $6,724 for wine and spirits)29.
Once opium was declared illegal in 1917, the underworld seized the opportunity for spectacular
new profits. The Green Gang became the city’s most important triad and forged alliances with Shang-
hai’s foreign and Chinese authorities, but also with the warlords who controlled the newest source of the
deadly crop: the rich poppy fields of south-western China. It is this gangster life of the city’s underworld
that Zhang Yimou captures so deftly in his film Shanghai Triad. It is this state of affairs that prompted
the comparison between the Shanghai of this era and Chicago, however, Shanghai’s scope for illegal ac-
30 Ibid., p. 12.
31 From Vicki Baum’s Shanghai ’37, quoted in Stella Dong’s Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent
City, p. 127.
32 Lynn Pan, Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise, p. 24.
33 Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, pp. 212-213.
34 Ibid., p. 216.
93
arrived in Shanghai and the following day sporadic firing started. On the 14th, a stream of refugees ten
miles long was making its way across the Garden Bridge (the point where the Suzhou River debouches
into the Huangpo), Chinese bombers, trying to bomb the Japanese warship Idzumo, panicked when they
saw the ship’s guns trained on them and accidentally dropped their payload onto the Bund, right in front
of the Cathay Hotel, as well as through the roof of the Peace Hotel next door.
Unfortunately, because of the unusually large number of refugees there at the time, the number
of casualties was appalling: 729 killed and 861 wounded35. More bombs were dropped shortly after-
wards at the intersection of Avenue Edouard VII (Yunnan Road) and Thibet (Tibet) Road, where the
Great World amusement centre was distributing free rice and tea, another 1,011 were killed and 570 in-
jured36; this was the worst civilian carnage anywhere in the world up to that time.
Two months of fighting followed, again mostly in Chapei. By the time of the Rape of Nanking
(12 December 1937, with as many as 300,000 civilians raped and murdered), Shanghai’s port had been
destroyed, along with most of its trade and industry37. The Japanese celebrated a Victory Parade along
Nanking Road on 3 December, by which time the foreign concessions, still under foreign jurisdiction,
were being referred to as the ‘Lonely Island’.
Then on 8 December 1941 (7 December in the United States), the Japanese bombed the United
States’s naval base of Pearl Harbour in Hawaii and World War II was finally fully underway. Shanghai’s
foreign concessions were immediately annexed by the Japanese and the city found itself under one ad-
ministration for the first time in a century, albeit a Japanese one. All clocks were set to Tokyo time38, and
of the 8,000 or so citizens of Allied countries who were still living in the city, all had to wear armbands
denoting their nationality: ‘A’ for American, ‘B’ for British, etc. Ethnic Asians, such as Filipinos, did not
have to undergo this indignity because the Japanese considered them part of their so-called Asian Co-
Prosperity Sphere. August 1943 saw the revocation of the treaty port status, which the Chinese saw as
the end of just over a century of humiliation. In July 1944 the first United States aircraft were seen in the
skies over Shanghai, and in November of that year air raids began. Japan finally surrendered uncondi-
tionally the following year on 16 August.
35 Ibid., p. 253.
36 Ibid., p. 254.
37 Ibid., p. 256. Although Niall Ferguson places this figure somewhat lower in The War of the World by es-
timating it to be around 260,000 (p. 477) it was still a massive massacre by any standards.
38 Lynn Pan, Old Shanghai: Gangsters in Paradise, p. 138.
39 Ibid., p. 189.
40 Stella Dong, Shanghai: Gateway to the Celestial Empire, 1860-1949, p. 30.
94
forces had fled to Taiwan.
So, just as the colonial-era Shanghai was seen as being in the front ranks of China’s
march towards progress, the city under Communist leadership loomed large in the Chinese psyche as
a guiding light. According to Pamela Yatsko ‘It stood for prosperity (fuyu), wealth (fanhua), fashion
(shimao), civilization (wenming), modernity (xiandai), and excellence (youxiu)’41. Shanghainese
competence, adaptability, and obedience – attributes that had stood them in good stead under the century
of foreign control – now served them well under the new Communist regime. Shanghai, that paragon
of capitalist accumulation, became, under the communists, a model for state control. Shanghai was the
place where the Cultural Revolution started. Chairman Mao, with the help of his wife, Jiang Qing (who
used to work as an actress in the city), used Shanghai as the launch pad for their attacks on political
rivals in the capital.
As we have seen in Part I, Shanghai, despite its importance to the country’s economy, and
its willingness to accede to Beijing’s wishes, suffered badly between 1949 and 1990. The central
government was ‘draining the pond to catch the fish’ as the Chinese saying goes. Hundreds of billions
of yuan were earned by the city in the first 30 years of Communist rule, yet the vast majority of this was
remitted to Beijing for redistribution elsewhere. Budgets allocated to Shanghai for basic construction
amounted to a paltry 7.4% of the amount the city sent up north, and of that fraction, the city spent
the vast majority of it on manufacturing, thereby neglecting items seen as non-productive, such as
housing, culture, health, and education42. Shanghai had turned into an ageing industrial relic, barely able
to function as a city, let alone lead the rest of the country. Meanwhile, the city’s central importance to
the national budget meant that Deng Xiaoping was reluctant to include it in his first wave of economic
reform, in case something went wrong. That is why when it was decided to set up four Special
Economic Zones in 1979, which would offer new infrastructure, tax holidays, and other perquisites to
foreign investors, they were located along China’s south-east coast, close to Hong Kong.
Shanghai’s situation was not helped by the turmoil caused by Chairman Mao’s death in 1976.
The city spent most of the next decade purging itself of its Gang of Four associations (the gang had
consisted of Mao’s wife and three of her Shanghai-linked favourites), this left the city’s economy further
adrift43. Mao’s successor, Hua Guofeng, replaced the city’s leadership with bureaucrats who could be
relied on be follow the new Party line. These leaders, loyal to Hua, as well as the traditional communist
orthodoxy, were reluctant to allow the sort of changes that Deng Xiaoping was envisaging, another
reason why Deng did not rush to experiment with the city. Even after these leaders’ departures in 1980
their successors did not hold positions in the national decision-making bodies, which were located
in Beijing, neither did they enjoy close connections with the central government, Shanghai, as a result,
was poorly positioned to lobby for more favourable policies, and, as we have seen, it was the 1980s
that saw the city’s only period of relative recession in a century and a half of otherwise stellar economic
growth.
Finally, in 1984, Beijing allowed Shanghai to open up to foreign investment. It opened the
Yangtze River Delta the following year, and by 1986 Shanghai was being allowed to set up three small
economic zones. Yet while these small steps were being taken in Shanghai, much of southern China was
taking off in a spectacular manner. Shanghai’s Mayor, Wang Daohan, then pushed for the development
of a 520-square-kilometer Special Economic Zone in Pudong, which, as we have seen, was launched in
April 1990. Finally Shanghai was able to reassert itself as an economic powerhouse.
Ironically, the Tiananmen Square incident of 4 June 1989 probably did more to help than hinder
Shanghai’s case. Despite large numbers of students protesting in the city, the Shanghai city government,
led by Party Secretary Jiang Zemin and the new Mayor Zhu, kept things well under control. Instead of
deploying the police or the military, as the Beijing leadership had done, with such disastrous results,
41 Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City, p. 14.
42 Ibid., p. 19.
43 Ibid., pp. 19-20.
95
Mayor Zhu sent in 100,000 workers from state enterprises and this managed to quell the protests44.
44 Ibid., p. 21.
96
2 COLONIALISM VERSUS IMPERIALISM
Colonial-era Shanghai was an amalgam of different jurisdictions: namely the foreign concessions and
a Chinese-administered city. But did this mean it was actually a colony? The French Concession was
indeed governed as a colony, from Hanoi, but the International Settlement was rather more unusual. It
was, in effect, a self-governing enclave, one that, of course, could not have survived without the implicit
(and sometimes explicit) backing of British and American force of arms, but it was very much its own
entity, and was answerable, ultimately, to no one but itself. So what exactly is a colony? Indeed, what is
colonialism? And how does it differ from imperialism?
There can be little doubt in anyone’s mind that the political systems that Britain and France
stretched across the globe in the latter half of the nineteenth century were empires. But what about the
United States? Its imperial ambitions were made clear when it annexed the Philippines in 1898, and
even though it granted that country independence in 1946, most of the mainland United States, the fa-
mous Union, was achieved through conquest and purchase, with genocidal clearings of autochthonous
population where it was felt this was needed (what today might be called ‘ethnic cleansing’). The Union
is still intact, but only after a bloody civil conflict between 1861 and 1865, but is the United Stated an
empire? David Harvey certainly seems to think that some if its recent actions smack of imperialism.
And what about China? Is it an empire? Certainly it was regarded as such when it was ruled by
an emperor. And while the imperial system of governance may have disappeared in 1911, the country,
coincidentally about the same size as the United States, and lying at roughly the same latitudes, still oc-
cupies most of what it annexed during its imperial eras of expansion (with the major exception of the
vast territories conquered by Genghis Khan). Formerly independent countries such as (Inner) Mongolia,
Manchuria, and Tibet are now all part of China; even Taiwan is regarded as a ‘renegade province’ and
any moves for it to declare full independence from China – a condition it enjoys in everything but name
– are frowned on by the mainland.
The imperial project – the move from colonialism to imperialism – took place as a result of cer-
tain countries’ ability to control strategic places; in Asia these would include the cities of Singapore,
Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Whereas colonialism’s aims were never very clear, it tended to develop
willy nilly – following trade routes, or often simply trade winds – imperialism had very different aims,
still strategic, but more of a blanket theory that could be applied over a wider area indiscriminately, not
merely the controlling of certain strategic points.
The people who made it happen, the empire-builders and colonists, are familiar to us today
through the pages of Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and H. Rider Haggard. W. Somerset Maugham’s
short story ‘The Door of Opportunity’ perfectly describes what was expected of a British colonial of-
ficial in Malaya in the 1920s. In Maugham’s typically ironic way he highlights these characteristics by
showing what Alban Torel, the anti-hero of the story, so conspicuously fails to do, with the result that a
promising career in the colonial service is cut short and a life effectively ruined. Maugham also takes a
sideswipe at the racist assertions that were current at the time, especially with regard to ‘half-castes’ or
Eurasians. He also manages, all in one short story, to evoke the distaste any hint of an ‘aesthetic’ way of
life provoked in a colonial situation. Related to all of the factors that Maugham has so expertly drawn
together is the question of perception, something that shall be dealt with in Part III when examining
Edward W. Said’s contention that nineteenth-century Europeans constructed an Oriental ‘Other’, and in
Part IV where the role of dress in this construction will also be considered, again taking a W. Somerset
Maugham short story as an illustration.
97
same benefits upon the world as the Pax Britannica secured in the last half of the nineteenth century’1.
Saskia Sassen sees a link between these two eras of imperial peace with the newer forms of administra-
tive, commercial, and development that had been set up by the European empires as ‘creating bridges
for the flow of capital, information, and high-level personnel’ under the Pax Americana2. According to
John Darwin, ‘[e]mpire is often seen as the original sin of European peoples’, the European great pow-
ers which spread their imperial tentacles across the entire face of the planet are seen as having ‘corrupt-
ed an innocent world’3. The word ‘empire’ actually still provokes a lot of hostility. According to Darwin
this is because many post-colonial states ‘found it natural to base their political legitimacy on the rejec-
tion of empire as an alien, evil and oppressive force’4. We have seen the knee-jerk reaction in postco-
lonial Shanghai to the alleyway house, perceived as dirty and outmoded they were also a reminder of a
humiliating past, with the result that huge numbers of them have been allowed to be destroyed. Ireland,
too, experienced something similar in the decades after independence (1922) when countless numbers
of houses, particularly in the Georgian style, were knocked down. Seen as despised reminders of British
oppression, these fine dwellings were destroyed by people who failed to appreciate that they were large-
ly built by Irish labour and talent, and as such represented a high point in that country’s native culture.
The history of the world is a history of empire. It is a type of political organisation that recurs
endlessly, yet why does the late-nineteenth-century European variation of it produce such conspicuous
revulsion? First of all, of course, we are still emerging from that era, or at least the aftermath of its de-
struction. Secondly, and more importantly, there seems to have been a belief ‘that there was something
qualitatively different about the empires that the Europeans made’5. Unlike traditional empires where the
main characteristic was the accumulation of land and people, the European model tended to expropri-
ate land. Land was expected to meet the requirements of plantations and mines, that were, in turn, en-
gaged in long-distance commerce. Native peoples were displaced, their property rights nullified (on the
grounds that, like the native American Indians mentioned earlier, they had failed to make full and proper
use of their land). Slaves were also shipped between continents. Even culture and identity were appro-
priated in the effort to ‘civilise’.
John Darwin’s analysis of the history of global empire is magisterial, and while most of it is con-
vincing, the theory that Europe’s domination was primarily the result of a series of accidents is too fan-
ciful. It is too reminiscent of Sir John Seeley’s contention that the British picked up their empire in a fit
of ‘absence of mind’. It can certainly be acknowledged that some of the results of empire-building were
unexpected, accidental even, but they were still the result of planning and effort. Much like Christopher
Colombus’s ‘accidental’ discovery of America while looking for a trade route to China. As we shall see
in the work of Michel Foucault, the forces that have operated in history are not controlled by some sort
of manifest destiny or its regulative mechanisms, instead they simply operate in response to conditions,
sometimes quite haphazard ones.
There have been many different kinds of empire: David Harvey lists the ‘Roman, Ottoman, Im-
perial Chinese, Russian, Soviet, Austro-Hungarian, Napoleonic, British, French, etc.’ and ascertains that
‘[f]rom this motley crew we can easily conclude there is considerable room for manoeuvre as to how
empire should be construed, administered, and actively constructed’6. The modern-day nation state has a
similar degree of manoeuvrability in asserting itself, but as we saw with the ridiculousness of comparing
a country like the United States to one like Singapore simply on the grounds that they both happen to be
states, the same could be said of empires.
John Darwin points out that the United States has conventionally tended to have been left out of
the narrative of nineteenth-century imperialism because, as we have just seen, it entering the game at
1 David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 4 (where he also refers to the work of Niall Ferguson).
2 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, p. XXXVI, endnote 12.
3 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 22.
4 Ibid., p. 23.
5 Ibid., p. 23.
6 David Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 5.
98
such a late stage (with its annexing of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War of 1898). But the
United States has long had a colonial presence in Asia, it was intimately involved with Shanghai since
its inception as a foreign settlement in 1842. It was also the United States that forced Japan to open up
after centuries of isolation, with Commodore Perry’s ships entering Edo (Tokyo) Bay on 8 July 1853.
In fact, John Darwin sees the United States’s peculiar route to empire as being extremely influen-
tial. Its industrial and financial capacity made it a part of what he sees as the Atlantic ‘core’ which aided
the expansion and integration of Europe. The United States’s trade enriched its trans-Atlantic partners,
but without consuming too much of their available capital. Its innovations in agricultural, mining, hy-
draulic and railway technology were readily deployed elsewhere, thanks to Europe’s ever increasing
expansion over the globe. And then there were its inventions, without which we would never have seen
quite such an increase in European, or perhaps we had better simply say Western, colonial expansion:
the telegraph, the Colt revolver, the Gatling and Maxim guns7, etc.
The United States, however, has never had to contend with the sort of troubles that usually be-
devil overseas empires: the Irish Republican Army, the Khmer Rouge, the Boxers, et al. There may have
been a lot of opposition to America’s involvement in Vietnam, but there has never been an Alaskan inde-
pendence movement, or trouble with Florida freedom fighters. Imperial rule usually engenders opposi-
tion, it certainly did so for the British in India and Ireland, and we can see it again today with China’s
difficulties in Tibet, but as empires go, the United States has seemed to buck this trend. (Of course the
United States was more than usually thorough in removing any potential threat from indigenous popula-
tions – of whom there were fewer in the first place.)
America’s recent history also shows how adept the country is at distancing itself from the stigma
of imperialism. David Harvey identifies Henry Luce’s influential 1941 editorial in Life magazine, which
was titled ‘The American Century’8, as a particularly clever move. Luce (coincidentally born in China)
was an isolationist, and he considered history to have conferred global leadership on the United States,
and that this role, thrust upon the country it may have been, was one that had to be actively embraced.
The power thus conferred was seen by Luce as global and universal rather than territorially specific,
Luce as a result, preferred to talk of an American ‘century’ rather than an American ‘empire’. Harvey
cites Neil Smith’s posing of the valid question: ‘How does one challenge a century?’9. How indeed? And
yet the United States’s leadership is still engaging in such sleight of hand: President George W. Bush’s
declaration of a ‘War on Terror’ is an example. How can one declare war on a concept like terror? Any
more than you can on a century? One might as well declare war on the colour blue. And surely it is one
of the duties of government to resist terrorism anyway? As far as David Harvey is concerned, this move
by Henry Luce was ‘beyond geography, [hence] the American Century was beyond empire and beyond
reproof’10.
America’s distinctive values tend to be presented as universals, with terms like freedom and de-
mocracy, respect for property, and for the individual,bundled together, becoming a code for the rest of
the world to live by – the famous phrase ‘making the world safe for democracy’ springs to mind. But
who gets to define this ‘democracy’? Like the era of the British and French Empires, it is usually the
person holding the biggest gun, which only serves to highlight the flaw at the heart of Enlightenment
thinking: one cannot force man to be free. No matter how well-intentioned motives are, and America’s,
despite all the damage that has sometimes been done, are very often well-intentioned; as were the
British and French before them. But good intentions can often do more damage than bad ones, the
nineteenth-century’s missions to civilise did irreparable damage to the native cultures of the countries
subjected to them.
And of course we must never lose sight of the fact that often this desire to improve the lot of
The drive of the Bush administration to intervene militarily in the Middle East likewise has
much to do with procuring firmer control over Middle Eastern oil resources. The need to exert
that control had ratcheted steadily upwards since President Carter first enunciated the doctrine
that the United States was prepared to use military means to ensure the uninterrupted flow of
Middle-Eastern oil into the global economy.11
And, as we saw in Part I, it is the desire for oil that is driving China to engage in its own neo-colonial
activity in Africa and elsewhere, the only difference is that the Chinese do not choose to dress up their
needs with distractions such as democracy (not that they could even if they wanted to, given their one-
party state). This, however, it very far from being the purview of this research, David Harvey’s points
just seemed to be something worthwhile to mention while on the topic of imperialism.
11 Ibid., p. 180.
12 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 223.
100
Also according to Robert J.C. Young, imperialism was a synonym for despotism when it first
began to be used in England in 1858, probably the result of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte of 1852, which was an attack on Napoleon III’s coup d’état of the previous year, which over-
threw France’s constitution of 1848. This event launched a new period of French expansion in an effort
to recapture the glory of the first French Empire under the emperor’s uncle, Napoleon I, a situation the
British found deplorable. Around 1870, the time Britain began to turn from colonialism to imperial-
ism, the term began to be used in a less derogatory way, when it began to denote the broader system of
economic domination that began to make itself felt in the British Empire, hence it was not perceived as
being negative any more. Young cites Winfried Baumgart as calling imperialism a hybrid term, i.e. one
that is used to denote a wide range of relationships of domination and dependence throughout history,
including theoretical and organisational differences13, it is only since the collapse of the great imperial
systems, notably that of France and Britain, that the term has taken on the universally negative connota-
tion it has today.
The British Empire was the product of three centuries of commerce, conquest, and colonisation,
it was the beneficiary of what Niall Ferguson has called ‘a remarkable global division of labour’14. As
we have just seen, one of colonialism’s key motive was economic, and Britain was one part of Europe
that experienced what John Darwin calls ‘a supercharged version of economic change’ in the nineteenth
century15. Britain’s economic trajectory was steeper than the rest of Europe because after 1760 there
was a huge shift from agriculture to manufacturing. Gains in productivity were concentrated in the tex-
tile industry, and the British also pioneered the use of steam power over coal.
Steam and coal actually formed a symbiotic relationship because it was steam power that en-
abled water to be pumped out of the coalmines, and of course it was coal that powered the steam. Ac-
cording to Darwin, without steam Britain’s coal production would have stagnated at around the 1700
level16. Britain’s government was also more attentive than most to the needs of trade and manufacturing
(which is probably why Napoleon I’s jibe about Britain being ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ stung so badly),
this was mainly because many industrialists actually sat in parliament and could thus direct government
policy to suit their needs. With the possible exception of the Netherlands, no other country has had so
commercially minded a ruling class. By 1880, Britain had become, arguably, the world’s most important
power, certainly its empire covered the most territory, and it was continuing to expand.
Empires are all about control. Earlier manifestations of them, as we have seen, were about con-
trol of land and people; nineteenth-century empires were about the control of trade and trade routes. The
British led the other powers by controlling the world’s sea lanes, and with them the world’s maritime
trade, this gave us the Pax Britannica, which we have seen mentioned by so many commentators. It
was also the raison d’ être for cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, because they were
so perfectly placed to capitalise on this trade. Britain’s success in the nineteenth century can be seen as
having resulted from two inter-related factors: one, the Seven Years War (1756-63), which ushered in a
half-century of war and revolution, but which ultimately ended France’s period of international pre-em-
inence. Britain defeated France in North America, and in India, establishing hegemony in the latter. The
former (with the exception of Canada) was of course a short-lived rule (America declared independence
in 1776).
France’s bid for glory under Napoleon I was also short-lived but it ushered in the second of the
two factors that allowed Britain to flourish: the century of peace that followed the Congress of Vienna
of 1814-15. This peace was the result of a new and experimental international co-operation known as
the ‘five-power concert’. Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria all aimed at maintaining peace in
Europe, and, with the odd not so terribly significant exception, it worked. The Vienna settlement in fact
13 Winfried Baumgart’s Imperialism: The Idea and Reality of British and French Colonial Expansion, cited
in Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, p. 26.
14 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 15.
15 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 194.
16 Ibid., p. 195.
101
proved so durable that it allowed Britain (and Russia – of which more below) free to pursue extra-Euro-
pean ambitions. And as for Asian colonialism, as John Darwin puts it, ‘Vienna opened the door to Asia’s
encirclement from the north and the south’17.
Some might think it strange to refer to the century from 1815 to 1914 as a period of peace in
Europe: there was the Crimean War (1854-6), the War of Italian Unification (1859-60), the War of the
German Unification (1866), the War of the Danish Duchies (1864), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-
71); as well as wars between European powers and their near neighbours, such as the Russian-Ottoman
conflict (1877-8), and the British-Egyptian one (1882). Devastating as these wars undoubtedly were for
those caught up in them, they remained limited conflicts, and as such did nothing to significantly alter
the balance of power on the continent. The stability that thus prevailed enabled Britain to enhance her
control over the world’s sea lanes, particularly in the North Atlantic, something that John Darwin cor-
rectly points out would have been unthinkable in conditions of maritime disorder. This allowed for a
huge increase in inter-continental trade, particularly the North-Atlantic one, which effectively included
America in that vast Northern world which now stretched from Alaska eastwards to Siberia.
The United States’s connectedness to Europe via fast and safe steamships enabled that country’s
economy to grow rapidly. Also, the balance of power that obtained in Europe ensured that intervention
in either North or South America was effectively ruled out by any other European power, thus allow-
ing the United States an opportunity to develop without the unnecessary expense of external defence
considerations. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 allowed for what Darwin calls ‘the single-minded pursuit
of economic growth’18, it also allowed the United States to settle its bloody and protracted civil conflict
(1861-65) without an intervention by a foreign power.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this peace allowed Britain (and France and Russia) to
pursue interests outside of Europe, with the understanding that they would always be under the scrutiny
of the other powers, so that too bold a unilateral move in any given arena would result in intervention
by another. This is how Britain, France, and Russia kept running up against each other, though it was
Britain’s territory that usually acted as the buffer: with Russia on the North-West Frontier (Afghanistan),
with France in South-East Asia, Africa, and, of course, in Shanghai. China was unique during the co-
lonial era in that it was an arena in which all the great powers (with the exception of Austria-Hungary)
met.
This super-block in the northern hemisphere can be seen as the precursor of today’s ‘West’. John
Darwin sees nineteenth-century Europe as transcending its limits and commanding what he calls the
centre of the world. This ‘Greater Europe’ included both Russia and the United States in a vast zone that
was unified by a shared sense of what Darwin calls ‘Europeanness’ (in which ‘Americanness’ is seen
as a sort of provincial variant). Europe had become something more than a mere geographical entity, it
had begun to reinvent itself as the West. A collection of societies with ideological, political, and cultural
differences: everything from American popular democracy to British parliamentary oligarchy to Rus-
sian tsarist autocracy, but they all found that they had more in common with each other when confronted
with other races in other parts of the world, which of course they increasingly did because of their ter-
ritorial and commercial expansion. When seen against an African or an Asian backdrop, these new Eu-
ropeans certainly seemed to have more to unite than to divide them. And this is the beginnings of what
Edward W. Said identifies as the European construction of the Oriental ‘Other’; an oriental ‘Other’ that
was a mirror in which the old Europe began to see itself in a new light: as ‘the West’.
Of course, because this West was being defined not by what it was, but by what it was not (i.e.
not the Orient, neither Asia nor Africa), it has always been a slippery and somewhat unstable construct.
Russia, initially, was very much part of it, certainly until 1917, after which time it became the Second
World. Now it is back in the fold once more, even becoming a member of the G819. There were, of
17 Ibid., p. 185.
18 Ibid., p. 228.
19 For a discussion of Russia (and Japan’s) role in the construction of the West please refer to Appendix 1.
102
course, differences between these newly Western countries, and these differences were reflected in their
systems of empire. The French had long distinguished between what they called colonisation and domi-
nation. The British, more classically, and decorously, differentiated between their ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’
colonies.
At imperialism’s heart lay the desire to civilise, this of course presupposed an unquestioned ra-
cial superiority on the part of those doing the ‘civilising’. This is an issue which has been dealt with at
length elsewhere, by other, better qualified commentators20, it is enough to mention here that it was an
important factor, but not one that is of central importance to this research. Britain’s ‘white man’s bur-
den’ and France’s mission civilisatrice meant that imperialism was not simply some vulgar grab for land
or cash, it was seen as a moral imperative. France’s mission was to bring French culture, religion, and
language to those races of the earth not fortunate enough to have thought of them for themselves. The
British tended to be somewhat less proselytising, preferring not to interfere with a local culture. While
this may seem at first glance to be more liberal, it was essentially based on the racist assumption that the
‘natives’ were incapable of education to a European level; the corollary of this was of course that the na-
tives were better off under colonial rule.
France’s system tended to assimilate local cultures, which may seem the more progressive of the
two, as it seems to assume a fundamental perception of equality between colonisers and colonised – the
French integrated their colonies into their polity, calling them départments d’outre mer; strictly speaking
they were not colonies at all – but actually the French system exhibited even less respect for local cul-
ture and language, because once united as an ‘equal’ part of the French heartland, local cultures tended
to be subsumed by the metropolitan one; ironically eradicating them all the more effectively than Brit-
ain’s laissez-faire system of non-interference.
One factor France and Britain both had in common was the architectural expression of the build-
ings built in their colonial cities. We have already seen Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s analysis of these visible
manifestations of colonial power with, among other things, the Singapore city plan. The penchant for
neo-classical architecture in colonial cities not only reflected colonial power relations, it also provided
an important link, particularly for the British, to ancient Greece and Rome. Britain flattered herself that
she was taking up the mantle left to her by Rome. Edward W. Said, Robert Irwin, and others have cited
the British insistence on teaching Latin and Greek in public schools; known as the ‘classics’, these were
required subjects for anyone applying for a job in the civil, foreign, or colonial services. The architec-
tural expression of these buildings represented the none-too-subtle set of power relations set up between
the coloniser and the colonised. The colonists’ homes further represented the glamour of empire, that
is what makes them so beautiful in the eyes of many today, and added to this nostalgic view is the poi-
gnant realisation that this was, after all, a doomed world, (at least during the 1920s and ’30s, the era so
often romanticised in literature and film). Of course labour was cheap in the colonies, so lavish homes
could easily be built, and lavish staff hired to maintain them: in the colonies, a middle-class person
could live like an aristocrat back home.
One subtle but important part of colonial possession was the act of naming, the British tended to
try and use local names where possible but in a typically dismissive gesture invariably got them subtly
wrong. The first thing a post-colonial country invariably does on independence is rename its places; in
Ireland’s case Kingstown reverted to Dun Laoghaire, Queenstown to Cobh, Maryborough to Portlaoise,
etc. In the case of China, where Peking is now known as Beijing, this is not a renaming in the postco-
lonial sense, but is something more complex and subtle, and has to do with language, which will be ex-
plained in Part IV when looking at the cultural construction of perception.
Imperialism as a ‘moral imperative’ was really only window dressing for what was actually go-
ing on: the grab for land and cash. Colonialism had worked well up until the 1870s, the American Civil
War (1861-65) would also have stimulated growth, but could it be a mere coincidence that Britain’s
turn to imperialism occurred at a time when the world’s economy was experiencing a downturn? Ironi-
29 Ibid., p. 188.
30 Ibid., p. 239.
31 Ibid., p. 239.
32 Ibid., p. 239.
107
tory, there was a global hierarchy of physical, economic, and cultural power. As John Darwin says:
[T]he world of 1900 was an imperial world: of territorial empires spreading across much of the
globe; and of informal empires of trade, unequal treaties and extraterritorial privilege (for Euro-
peans) - and garrisons and gunboats to enforce it - over most of the rest. Concepts of internation-
al law (invented in Europe) dismissed claims to sovereignty (and justified foreign intervention)
unless the state concerned met a ‘standard of civilization’ that was approved in Europe.33
But as we have seen all this expansion did nothing to ease the minds of those in control, if anything it
made them even more anxious. As John Darwin puts it:
The strategists were just as nervous. They saw Britain’s naval power and small professional
army as dangerously overextended. Some of the most acute observers wondered whether the
spread of railways had turned the tables on the great sea power. Perhaps the balance of advantage
now lay with the rulers of an impregnable land mass - like Russia, the “inland tyranny” – safe
from British chastisement.34
Darwin is probably onto something there, but just as he missed the connection between Colum-
bus and the Atlantic Ocean’s currents, here, too, he overlooks the effect air power was to have on the
maritime empires. Aerial transport simply doomed these constructions to oblivion; by 1920 their days
were numbered.
Something else happened in World War I that was to profoundly change the world. Until this
time war was seen as a profession; military organisation throughout the nineteenth century had became
increasingly professional, with the introduction in the eighteenth century of uniforms, drilling, and an
officer corps. This is something that Michel Foucault examines in great detail in Surveiller et punir35.
The innovations that had been made in the military throughout the nineteenth century were all changed
by World War I, particularly the introduction of conscription.
European armies had evolved throughout the nineteenth century into highly specialised ma-
chines. Until the Congress of Vienna they had mainly concentrated on fighting one another, after 1815
they fought the rest of the world. John Darwin sees this an age of equilibrium where ‘…no power in Eu-
rope was strong enough to dominate the others completely…’36, neither was any power free to embark
on a career of overseas conquest without fear of challenge from a rival. In 1914 they all turned on one
another, with a resulting deadlock that had to rely on unprofessional soldiers to back up their profes-
sional armies. These were men who had to be trained quickly. While interesting, this is not the key point
to be noted here, World War I also saw the beginning of that most terrible of twentieth-century innova-
tions: total war. Not only did soldiering cease to be the domain of the professional, the civilian became
fair game. The sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania on 7 May 1915, with the loss of 1,198 lives, was a turn-
ing point. The first in a series of ever more atrocious steps which led inexorably to the Rape of Nanking
in 1937 and the bombing of Dresden in 1945. (The Germans wasted no time in attacking civilian ship-
ping in World War II, sinking the liner Athenia within hours of Britain’s declaration of war on 3 Septem-
ber 1939.) The ‘contained conflict’ of the nineteenth century was not to be seen again until the United
States started its own late-twentieth-century campaigns.
One other small but telling point about the beginning of World War I was the fact that immedi-
ately the war started Britain cut Germany’s telegraph cables. The British understood the importance of
‘intelligence’, and, even more importantly, keeping the enemy starved of it. This was possibly the first
act of techo-warfare the world has ever seen, it also effectively ended the era of globalisation we saw
37 Ibid., p. 328.
38 Ibid., p. 328.
39 Simon Schama, ‘The Wrong Empire’, Volume 4 1689-1836, A History of Britain (DVD).
40 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 108.
41 Ibid., p. 108.
109
British colonies such as Barbados and Jamaica, planters lived as they would in England, they wore
wigs and woollens, ate bread and meat (mostly salted and brought in from America), and they drank – a
leitmotif of colonial life that was to be seen again and again in the writings of W. Somerset Maugham,
Anthony Burgess, et al. As Simon Schama dryly put it: ‘Nobody settled in the West Indies to read the
Bible unmolested’42. And it was not just the drinking, this insistence on dressing as if one were at home
in England was something that W. Somerset Maugham was to make much of in his stories of colonial
life in British Malaya in the 1920s, and was also something that was to play an important role in the
colonials’ perceived superiority.
John Darwin asserts that imperialism can be defined as ‘the attempt to impose one state’s
predominance over other societies by assimilating them to its political, cultural and economic system’43.
It was carried out using a variety of political apparatuses: sometimes with direct political control, for
example, the crown colonies of Hong Kong or Singapore. Often it was disguised by leaving a notionally
sovereign government in place, the patchwork of princely states in British India and Malaya, with their
British Residents and Advisors, are a case in point. Sometimes it led to the displacement of indigenous
peoples by an influx of new settlers; this describes Australia and New Zealand (and America). Invariably
it was intended to delimit a sphere of economic exclusion, reserving trade and investment for the
imperial power. Usually it was underpinned by some spurious ‘civilising mission’, based in turn on the
racist assumption of the imperial power’s inherent superiority over those it ruled.
Ironically, it was not the British or French imperial spheres that contained the worse racism but
the United States. France, at least officially, espoused liberty, equality, and fraternity for all her citizens,
and did not even differentiate between the mainland and the colonies. Britain had no race laws, neither
had it any anti-miscegenation ones. True, as can be seen in the writings of people like W. Somerset
Maugham, intermarriage between races was frowned upon, but it was very far from being illegal, the
worst that might happen is that an ‘offender’ might find himself snubbed at the club (admittedly the
clubs themselves did tend to have strict rules about which races they admitted). Sadly it was ‘the land
of the free and the home of the brave’ that enshrined racial inequality into law. The race question is one
that this thesis has been at pains to avoid, it is one, however, that cannot go unmentioned in any survey
of late-nineteenth-century imperialism that intends to be considered comprehensive.
Jane Jacobs argues that the very policies and transactions that were necessary to win, hold, and
exploit empires were destructive to an imperial power’s own cities and led inevitably to their stagna-
tion and decay44. In Jacobs’s view successful imperialism wins wealth, yet successful empires have
not remained rich, (she cites Persia, Rome, Byzantium, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, France, and Britain).
Indeed, Jacobs sees it as the fate of empires to become too poor to sustain the cost of running them,
and the longer an empire holds together, the poorer and more economically backward it will become.
Jacobs saw imperial Britain as a fabulous exporter of capital, but while this money was used to build up
the empire, British cities themselves were gradually stagnating, preparing for themselves a decline so
deep that, until 1984 (the date of her book’s publication), it had proved irreversible. (The revival of Brit-
ain’s economy in the second half of the 1980s, and the prosperity that came with it, would have seemed
most unlikely at her time of writing.) Jacobs identifies Britain’s imperial expansion as rendering Brit-
ish production sterile for import-replacement, something she identifies as a key element in a country’s
economic well-being. With a sort of garrison economy opening up, vast sums were spent on defence,
and on keeping the sea lanes open, cities came to rely on either exports to backward and inert economies
or on the military, both of which are situations that Jacobs shows convincingly lead to a city’s decline.
According to Jacobs, ‘[a]ll the wealth of the Indies could not compensate for the stagnation and decline
of Britain’s own cities’ economies. But the stagnation and decline were built right into the very transac-
tions necessary to win, hold, administer and exploit the wealth of the Indies’45.
42 Simon Schama, ‘The Wrong Empire’, Volume 4 1689-1836, A History of Britain (DVD).
43 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 416.
44 Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 182.
45 Ibid., p. 198.
110
Jane Jacobs also identifies imperial powers that held together only briefly as being more suc-
cessful, and cites Germany and Japan. She also mentions those that abruptly contracted into small home
nations, like the Netherlands and Austria, as being lucky to have done so. While Jacobs’s contention that
imperialism damages the cities of the metropolitan centre is perfectly correct, her analysis does not dif-
ferentiate enough between different sorts of empire. It also fails to take account of the fact that China
and the United States can both be thought of as imperial systems. At the time of her writing the decline
of the United Kingdom’s cities may well have seemed hopeless but, as has been seen, with the changes
wrought by global capitalism’s reinvention of itself in the 1970s Britain’s change from a manufacturing
to a service-based economy has rendered most of Jacobs’s perfectly valid points somewhat moot. Brit-
ain has made a transition to the new economy with conspicuous success, and has won for herself a place
once again at the forefront of the global economy.
In Jacobs’s analysis imperial systems seem to inevitably fall prey to the second law of thermody-
namics, slowly winding down and feeding off themselves. World War I changed everything. As we have
seen it ended an era of globalisation, and ushered in an era of total war. The treaties of Versailles, Saint-
Germain-en-Laye, and Sèvres dismembered the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires and
led to the creation of ten independent new countries, but it did not mean the end of empire. The British
and French snapped up the former Ottoman possessions in the Middle East, while Britain also got to
take over Germany’s colonies in Africa and the South Pacific.
It may not have been the end of empire, but it was certainly the beginning of the end. The
turning point came in 1929, not because of the Wall Street Crash (which dealt global capitalism a near
fatal blow, and one which it only recovered from during World War II when the West was lifted out of
its Depression), but because this overtly territorial phase of imperialism ended when Britain restored
tariff autonomy to China in that year.
The Western powers had finally recognised that there could be no hope of making further inroads
into China, certainly not along the lines of the scramble for Africa a half-century before. The Japanese
did go on to make inroads, but those, like Nazi Germany’s in Europe and North Africa, were to be short-
lived. The following year, 1930, Britain returned their North China naval base Wei Hai Wei to China
(the lease had expired). This handing back of Wei Hai Wei is the high-tide mark of the British Empire,
a point from which it began to shrink. It was a mere seventeen years later, in 1947, that Britain allowed
India independence, and the following year, Ireland became a Republic. If India was the jewel in the
crown, Ireland had been the keystone in Britain’s imperial arch, with both of them gone there was in ef-
fect no more British Empire.
World War II accelerated the world’s pace of change. India’s support for Britain during the War
was premised on the understanding that it would be granted independence immediately the conflict
ended. With the humiliating fall of Singapore to the Japanese on 15 February 1942 (following Hong
Kong and Shanghai’s respective falls the previous December) Britain’s prestige as an imperial power in
Asia had evaporated. After World War II we saw an American cruiser moored at Britain’s No.1 Buoy on
Shanghai’s Bund, then with the communist victory in 1949, and Shanghai trapped behind the ‘bamboo
curtain’ for a generation, all the city’s talent, and wealth, and expertise fled to Hong Kong (along with
considerable manpower). It is to Hong Kong and Singapore that we shall now turn.
111
3 HONG KONG AND SINGAPORE
In order to gain a better understanding of reform-era Shanghai, the post-socialist city, we have been
looking at its history: pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial; but in order to gain a better understand-
ing of Shanghai’s history it is perhaps beneficial to compare it to other cities in the East-Asian region
which share its colonial heritage, namely Hong Kong and Singapore. Shanghai’s authorities could learn
a lot from looking at these cities’ recent histories. Both went from being colonial enclaves, one could
almost say backwaters, to global cities remarkably quickly, and for the most part against great odds. We
have seen how a colonial history can actually increase a city’s chances of becoming a node in the global
network, Hong Kong has benefited from this link to empire by maintaining its Chinese and Western
business connections. The city may well have all but destroyed any visible manifestations of its links to
empire, which is ironic as it remained a British crown colony until so very recently (becoming a Special
Administrative Region of China in 1997) but, as was argued in Part I, the stability of its judiciary as well
as the probity of its civil service have stood it in good stead (and here the city has a distinct advantage
over Shanghai).
For the first century of its existence Hong Kong was the poor relation to its colonial cousins
Shanghai and Singapore. Shanghai was, after all, the gateway to China, whereas Singapore was the en-
trepot for British Malaya (with all its tin and rubber, Malaya was one of the richest colonies in the Brit-
ish Empire in the run up to World War II). Hong Kong, as we have seen, really only came into its own
after 1949, when Shanghai vanished behind the ‘bamboo curtain’. Hong Kong found its position further
enhanced when Singapore was expelled from the Malay Federation in 1965 (cut off from its traditional
hinterland, the city-state was forced to reinvent itself).
Singapore was not founded in the usual way of cities, at least according to novelist J.G. Farrell.
In Farrell’s novel The Singapore Grip he points to the fact that there was no gradual accretion of com-
mercial activity along the banks of the Singapore River, instead the city came into being virtually over-
night because of an unusually able colonial administrator, Thomas Stamford Raffles (later knighted for
his efforts), who decided that Britain needed a ‘manufactory’ halfway between India and China. Raffles
looked at a map and decided on the island of Singapore as the perfect place for such a base. The British
had been looking for a foothold in the region after they were forced to relinquish control of the Dutch
East Indies (which they had administered while the Netherlands was occupied by Napoleon’s armies).
Raffles negotiated a series of treaties with local rulers culminating on the 6 February 1819 when the is-
land of Singapore was ceded to the British in perpetuity. Raffles, along with his Irish architect George
Drumgoole Coleman, then drew up a town plan which, as we have already seen, dividing the city into
different enclaves based on race.
Like most colonial cities, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore were developed in a way that
can be called parthenogenetic1, i.e. a Western footprint imprinted on or next to an older Asian city
(Shanghai and Hong Kong both had walled Chinese settlements). Singapore’s colonial core is still rela-
tively intact, certainly when compared to Hong Kong’s, and it is from Singapore’s longer-established
tradition of rehabilitation and reuse of colonial-era buildings that Shanghai may well be able to learn
something.
Manuel Castells has identified the towering figure of Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee
Kuan Yew (in office from 1959 to 1990), as ‘inventing a society out of nowhere, and making it the his-
torical proof of the superiority of “Asian values”’2, a project Castells suggests Lee ‘probably dreamed
in his Oxford years, as a nationalist without a nation’3. Actually Lee went to Fitzwilliam College,
Cambridge, not Oxford, but this does not alter Castells’s point that it was while Lee was in the United
1 ‘Parthenogensis’ is a biological term referring to a method of reproduction, usually that of ants or bees,
for populating a colony by means of a fertile queen.
2 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 305.
3 Ibid., p. 305.
112
Kingdom that he ‘rediscovered Victorian England, with its cult of moral virtues, its obsession with
cleanliness, its abhorrence of the undeserving poor, its belief in education, and in the natural superiority
of the few highly educated’4. Castells is correct to point out that this is the moral tone that continues to
permeate and influence Singapore’s political culture and institutions today. It is probably more balanced
to add, however, that the influence of a brutal but efficient criminal justice system imposed on Singapore
during the Japanese occupation during World War II is what really underscores Lee’s views on strict
punishment as effective in reducing crime, as Lee says in his memoirs, ‘[p]unishment was so severe that
crime was very rare’, and he goes on to add, ‘[a]s as result I have never believed those who advocate a
soft approach to crime and punishment, claiming that punishment does not reduce crime. This was not
my experience in Singapore before the war, during the Japanese occupation, or subsequently’5. A policy
which, while it may have reduced crime at home, has probably done more harm than good to the city-
state’s image abroad.
Castells points out that Singapore and Hong Kong both created ‘an Asian version of the British
welfare state, centered around public housing and social services’6, with the public housing estates play-
ing a fundamental role in social integration. Hong Kong’s public housing acted as a de facto citizenship
for its largely immigrant working class whereas Singapore’s social engineering used vehicles such as the
Housing Development Board (HDB) and the development of new towns in helping to diffuse ethnic ten-
sions.
By independence in 1965 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles’s town plan had outlived its usefulness.
The city had become something of a non-entity, the abandoned military outpost of a defunct British
Empire, an entrepot cut off from its traditional hinterland (Malaysia), and a society riven by race riots.
It was also in real danger of being annexed by Indonesia, who even instigated a terror campaign when
Singapore joined the Malay Federation in 1963. Known as the Confrontasi, this campaign resulted in a
number of bombings in the city. As Castells correctly points out, Singapore could quite easily have be-
come another Sri Lanka.
Singapore did not receive much aid in its early years, what it did benefit from was the oil and
ship-repairing industries that sprung up in the wake of American military involvement in Vietnam. This
happy conjunction of regional proximity to, and political support for, an American involvement in the
conflict ensured Singapore’s survival. The fact that it also had a hard-headed, business-minded govern-
ment was another crucial factor. Yet despite all that talent and drive, Singapore, without the enviable
geographical position that had led Raffles to found the city in the first place, could well have disap-
peared as an independent political entity.
Geopolitics, according to Manuel Castells, provided the grounds by which the politics of surviv-
al became successful developmental policies, and which paved the way for one of the tiger economies
that so startled the world at the end of the twentieth century. This is yet another reminder of the impor-
tant link between colonial networks and global cities: both depend to a large extent on their geographical
position. A city’s ability to compete at a global level needs to have some basis on geography otherwise
it may never prove to be viable. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai all occupy the most enviable of
geographical positions, and it is this, more than anything else, that has ensured their continued success.
Singapore continues to baffle Manuel Castells. He sees it as different from the other tiger econo-
mies (Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea) in that it has no civil society. The state seems to be as
powerful and as active as ever, with authoritarian politics, strict controls on information, and a tight rein
on the steering and monitoring of development. He scornfully dismisses the naïve view that the disci-
plined, efficient, and relatively cheap labour forces that have enabled these tiger economies to develop
so spectacularly come from ‘the supposedly submissive nature of Asian labor’7, which he sees, correctly,
as a plainly racist statement. Neither does he believe that it comes from Confucianism (neo- or other-
Hong Kong
Hong Kong changed dramatically after 1949. As a consequence of the Communist victory in China,
with money and expertise flooding in from Shanghai, as well as manpower from southern China,
the city’s segue into a manufacturing centre seemed a logical choice. Hong Kong, as it remained a
British crown colony, was able to export not only to the British Commonwealth, but it also received a
degree of support from the United Kingdom that Manuel Castells sees as decisive in securing export
quotas for its early penetration of world markets. Castells also points out, again correctly, that it was
the colony’s ‘role vis-à-vis China, together with its economic success, that prevented Hong Kong
from joining the decolonization process, since neither the United Kingdom nor China could accept its
independence’10.
Hong Kong become a British Crown Colony in 1843, expanded its territory significantly un-
der the terms of a lease in 1898, and reverted to China in 1997. Castells is somewhat less than correct
when he states that ‘…the territory is now fully part of China’11, actually it is a Special Administrative
Region, with a Beijing-appointed Chief Executive who must at least take note of the wishes of
the democratically elected Legislative Council. This anomaly, in a China ruled by a Communist
Party, has earned the territory the rubric of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (something we saw Ackbar
Abbas comment on earlier), and which will remain in place until 2047. Abbas also maintains that
any discussion of Hong Kong’s culture must ‘sooner or later raise the question of its relation to
colonialism’12, he sees the history of Hong Kong as a history of colonialism, something that is of central
relevance to understanding what the city has become today.
Both Hong Kong and Shanghai came into being as colonial entities as a result of the First Opium
War (1839-42), and the Treaty of Nanking which ended it. Hong Kong, unlike Shanghai, was largely
uninhabited, being described by Lord Palmerston (Britain’s Prime Minister at the time) as ‘a barren is-
8 Ibid., p. 281.
9 Ibid., p. 281.
10 Ibid., p. 279.
11 Ibid., p. 321.
12 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 1.
114
land which will never be a mart of trade’13. Located at the point where the Pearl River debouches into
the South China Sea it was established by Captain Elliot as a safe haven for British trade after the dif-
ficulties they, and other foreign traders, had experienced in Canton (Guangzhou); difficulties that had
sparked off the Opium War in the first place. Captain Elliot’s choice was not immediately appreciated,
in fact he was pilloried for insisting on such paltry spoils after so decisive a victory, it was only later that
the wisdom of his choice began to be perceived. Hong Kong possesses not only a magnificent natural
harbour, it was also, according to Peter G. Rowe, ‘sufficiently far afield from Guangzhou, as well as
Portuguese Macau, to be defensible and a potential staging post for further naval operations’14.
Initially consisting of the Island of Hong Kong and the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, the colony
expanded into the New Territories under the terms of a lease foisted upon the Chinese in 1898. This was
the result of concerns over the colony’s defence in the wake of the United States’s successful annexation
of the Philippines earlier that year (until that time a Spanish colony). The capture of Manila had been ef-
fected in May that year by the United States Navy operating out of Mirs Bay, which was seen as being
too close to Hong Kong for comfort. Fear of French and Russian aggrandisement in the Far East was
also a factor. According to G.B. Endacott, the French, after their acquisition of Tongking following the
Sino-French War (1884-85), were threatening to control the whole of China’s southern provinces15, this
was then followed by the surprise of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1893 (also a crucial step on the road
to World War I). Germany was also perceived as a threat; although a small one, it was one more factor
in an increasingly unstable regional equation.
Japan too, after the defeat of China in the war of 1894-95, and the subsequent the Treaty of Shi-
monoseki, had become a power in the region. Intervention by Russia, France, and Germany deprived Ja-
pan of most of the spoils of this war (with Russia securing for herself the valuable railway concessions
in Manchuria). Germany then occupied Kiaochow (Jiaozhou) in November 1897 and secured a 99-year
lease on it the following March. Russia went on to occupy Port Arthur (Lushunkou) and to control the
Liaodong Peninsula, while France secured the lease of Kwangchowan (Guangzhouwan) on the Kwang-
tung (Guangdong) coast, with the right to build a railway from Tongking (Tonkin in Vietnam) to Yun-
nan as well as other concessions from China. Britain’s wish to consolidate her position in Hong Kong
was not vitiated by any concerns over what the Chinese might do, rather it was in response to rivalry
between these other great powers. Britain also, at this time, secured the lease of Wei Hai Wei (in April
1898), the port which, as we have seen earlier, can be identified as the high-tide mark of her empire. Un-
der the terms of the lease of 1 July 1898, Hong Kong’s boundary was extended by 570 square kilome-
tres (355 square miles), however, the crucial difference with the Treaty of 1842 was the fact that control
of this vast new area was to revert to China after a period of 99 years16.
Ackbar Abbas maintains that Hong Kong’s history is one of shock and radical change. He sees
Hong Kong citizens’ lack of sentiment for the past as a protection against these historical traumas. And
yet history does exist in Hong Kong, ‘if not in surviving monuments or written records, then in the
jostling anachronisms and spatial juxtapositions that are seen on every street; that is, history is inscribed
in spatial relations’17. Abbas is interested in investigating a specific cultural space in Hong Kong that he
feels can be evoked through the discussion of cultural forms and practices; this is something that shall
be dealt with in Part IV of this thesis, it is enough to mention here Abbas’s work in highlighting the
important link between Hong Kong, as a colonial enclave, and Hong Kong the global city, which serves
to reinforce the point made earlier in Part I about colonial networks being a useful foundation for global
ones.
Ackbar Abbas sees a strange dialectic between autonomy and dependency in Hong Kong’s
relations with both Britain and China. The end of British rule and the handing back of sovereignty
13 Quoted in Peter G. Rowe’s, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 49.
14 Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 49.
15 G.B. Endacott, A History of Hong Kong, p. 260.
16 Ibid., pp. 260-269.
17 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 26.
115
to the Chinese was not a simple matter of returning a Chinese territory to the Chinese. Abbas sees
Hong Kong’s colonial history as distancing the territory culturally and politically from the mainland,
making their relationship anything but a simple reunification. Abbas sees what happened in Hong
Kong as ‘a postcoloniality that precede[d] decolonization’18. He quite brilliantly deconstructs the ‘One
Country, Two Systems’ formula by terming it as two systems (i.e. socialistic and capitalistic) that have
become unified in the nexus of the territory of Hong Kong as ‘one system [but] at different stages of
development’19. As he presciently points out:
Postcoloniality does not take the physical departure of the colonial power (or even the
subject’s own departure) as its point of origin, just as colonialism in its effects does not end with
the signing of a treaty. Postcoloniality begins, indeed it has already begun, when subjects find
themselves thinking and acting in a certain way; in other words, postcoloniality is a tactic and a
practice, not a legal-political contract, nor a historical accident.20
Ackbar Abbas examines Hong Kong cinema in his exploration of the culture of disappearance
that exists in the territory, with the work of serious auteurs such as Ann Hui, Tsui Hark, Allen
Fong, John Woo, Stanley Kwan, and Wong Kar-wai, as well as some more popular local efforts. He sees
the use of mainstream forms in Hong Kong cinema as ‘…not necessarily a sign of intellectual inertia
or of pandering to the masses. It is more a sign of the slippery nature of Hong Kong’s cultural space’21.
This is something that we shall be returning to at the end of Part IV when Shanghai’s recent portrayal
in film and literature will be examined. Shanghai has yet to establish a name for itself in the medium,
however, it is increasingly being profiled in international cinema with films such as The Painted Veil (a
re-adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham novel, where the action has been moved from the Hong Kong
of the book to Shanghai), The White Countess, the screenplay of which was written by Kazuo Ishiguro
(whose novel When We Were Orphans will form the main focus of the last chapter of Part IV), and Lust,
Caution, among others.
Hong Kong is a global city, and, as we have seen earlier in David R. Meyer’s analysis, global
cities are where decision makers, operating in local and inter-urban social networks, congregate. They
do this because the ‘need to control and co-ordinate increasingly complex exchange requires that actors
specialise, thus intensifying the need to communicate sophisticated information, often through face-to-
face exchange’22. Intermediaries are forced ‘…to build transactions on trust in order to minimise risks
of exchange across international boundaries; and they do this through friendship, family, ethnic, or reli-
gious ties’23. And as we have seen before ‘[t]he world city system always has had a network foundation;
modern telematics, while permitting instantaneous communication of vast amounts of information, has
not created a network system where none existed before’24. These social networks are the fundamental
governing structure of these exchanges, and the intermediaries who use them require face-to-face con-
tact to acquire their information, develop their strategies, and acquire trustworthy partners.
According to Meyer, Hong Kong operates the largest teleport in Asia, and the Hong Kong gov-
ernment has been more the facilitator of development than the formal director of it. As we have seen,
Hong Kong has the greatest array of fibre-optic international cables of any metropolis in Asia, Oceania,
North America, and Europe, and its satellite contacts permit global reach. Just another of the many rea-
sons why Shanghai will have its work cut out for it if it is to be taken seriously as a competitor to Hong
18 Ibid., p. 6.
19 Ibid., p. 6.
20 Ibid., p. 10.
21 Ibid., p. 20 (italics in original).
22 David R. Meyer, ‘Hong Kong: Global Capital Exchange’ in Global Networks, Linked Cities, Saskia Sas-
sen, ed., p. 249.
23 Ibid., p. 251.
24 Ibid., p. 252.
116
Kong. However, the main point that must be made here is that the construction or improvement of infor-
mation and communication-technology networks cannot substitute for social networks, and what facili-
tated these social networks, the stability of the business environment, the investment in infrastructure,
and the adherence to international standards of business law, was the fact that they were all founded by
the British in Hong Kong, and as such are the foundations upon which the territory’s global pre-emi-
nence today has been built.
Manuel Castells sees this as being the result of what he calls an administrative class, a small
group of elite civil servants who were recruited by the colonial and civil services in Britain, and who
generally attended the better colleges such as those in Oxford and Cambridge. This was a class with
‘strong social and ideological cohesion, shared professional interests and cultural values, that seems
to have controlled power within the Hong Kong state for most of the history of the Colony’25, they
exercised their power the better to facilitate the interests of Hong Kong’s business community, a group
which enjoyed far greater freedom in its operations than most others in the international capitalist
system of the second half of the twentieth century. A fact which is perfectly illustrated in the novels
of James Clavell, particularly Noble House. According to Manuel Castells, this administrative class’s
interest in relation to the future of Hong Kong was twofold:
[T]o maintain the Colony in the midst of the turmoil of decolonization and the threatening stands
of the British Labour party; and to show the world that the Colonial Service, on behalf of what
was left of the tradition of the British Empire, was more able than any other political institution
(including the new independent national states) to ensure the prosperity of the new Asian world,
including to a large extent the well-being of its people, in a paternalistic attitude that evokes the
historical precedent of ‘enlightened despotism’.26
Although Castells is quick to point out that his ethnographic material on the subject is
[T]oo unsystematic to be conclusive, it did convince [Castells] that the dedication and
effectiveness of the elite Colonial Civil Service of Hong Kong was tantamount to the last hurrah
of the British Empire. The ‘Hong Kong cadets’ aimed at building Hong Kong’s prosperity as an
ideological monument to the historic memory of the lost Empire, while also taking care of their
retirement years, in England.27
This assessment is sound, furthermore, it could be seen as being reinforced by Ibn Warraq’s
more recent analysis of the Indian civil service, both prior to, and after, independence from Britain in
1947 (something that shall be mentioned in Part III when looking at Warraq’s critique of Edward W.
Said’s work). Hong Kong’s civil service was the perfect vehicle for a symbiotic dovetailing of Chinese
and British business expertise, and as a service itself could perhaps be seen as echoing the golden age
of China’s own merit-based, neo-Confucian civil service which reached a peak of efficiency in the late-
Ming and early-Qing Dynasties.
Singapore
One would expect a degree of continuity in Hong Kong’s colonial civil service, after all the territory
only recently ceased to be a British colony. Singapore’s civil service, however, has also enjoyed a
remarkable degree of continuity, although it achieved a staggered independence as long ago as the
1960s (from Britain in 1963, and thence from the Malay Federation – from which it was expelled in
1965). Singapore has remained a staunch member of the British Commonwealth, and was a British
25 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 288.
26 Ibid., p. 288.
27 Ibid., pp. 288-289.
117
military base until the 1970s. In fact Singapore was reluctant to see the British armed forces leave as
they had been a useful source of income for the impoverished city-state, particularly after it found itself
cut off from its traditional Malay hinterland. Singapore has been only too happy to continue the proud
traditions of its civil service, judiciary, and parliamentary democracy, and, unusually for a postcolonial
city, has continued to venerate its British founder, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles.
Hong Kong, despite being a crown colony until 1997, seems to have had no qualms about
cutting the visible trappings of colonialism, certainly it has done so to a much greater extent than
Singapore – this is Abbas’s ‘culture of disappearance’. There seems to have been no emotional
attachment to these trappings in Hong Kong, merely a canny use of their networks to enable business in
the colony to survive and prosper. The colonial-era buildings may have gone from Hong Kong but the
institutions they once housed are still very much in place. And are still working, as they always have
done. This they do by working closely with the less visible but equally effective Chinese networks.
Singapore was founded, as we have seen, in 1819. It was a port city strategically located close
to the old Portuguese-Dutch settlement of Malacca, and straddling the narrow shipping passage linking
the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. An Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 partitioned the Malay archi-
pelago into British and Dutch spheres of influence (roughly approximating the countries of Malaysia
and Indonesia today), and effectively ending the struggle for control of the Indian Ocean which had be-
gun with the Seven Years War (1756-63), leaving Britain as the regional hegemon. Britain had acquired
Prince of Wales Island (Penang) from Siam (now Thailand) in 1786, and Malacca from the Dutch in
1795. This was followed by Mauritius (from the French) in 1810. When Raffles arrived on the island,
the population of Singapore was around one thousand, mostly Malay, but with some Chinese, Bugis,
and Orang Laut. There were some fishing villages, but no settlement of any importance. Early Singapore
was divided along racial lines and consisted of, in Peter G. Rowe’s words, a ‘settlement in the form of
a necklace like string of communities stretching along 1.6 km of the coastline and dominated by the
European town, reflecting the Palladianism that was rife in England at the time’28. Perhaps ‘rife’ is not
the pleasantest word to use for a style that is so elegant, and one which is so well suited to the tropical
climate, but as a style it was certainly popular, and was undeniably an alien intervention in South-East
Asian urbanism.
Raffles’s plan stipulated a European town to be laid out to the east of the government enclave,
with the rest of the different Asian races that formed the population of Singapore allotted each their own
area. The Chinese got the south bank of the Singapore River, the shape of which was supposed to lend
it favourable feng shui, the Malay sultan, the erstwhile ruler of the island, was allocated approximately
22 hectares (56 acres) in Kampong Gelam, to the east of the European town (where the architect
Coleman built him a handsome mansion), Arab traders occupied a kampung located between Kampong
Gelam and the European settlement. While the Indians, who arrived later, some of whom were convict
labour, were settled in the area that became known as Little India, to the north-west of Kampong
Gelam. Singapore immediately experienced impressive growth, its status as a free-trade port, coupled
with its strategic location, made it an ideal link between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, it also acted
as the entrepot for the produce of the Malay Peninsula, initially tin, then coffee, and finally the hugely
lucrative rubber trade.
For these very reasons Singapore always outshone Hong Kong, and by 1903 had become the
seventh largest port in the world, with its population doubling between 1900 and 1930 (rising from
225,000 to around 550,000)29. Chinese were attracted by the business opportunities the colony provided,
although they had been settling on the Malay Peninsula for centuries. Their intermarriage with local
Malays had resulted in a rich hybrid culture known as Peranakan (Malay for ‘born locally’), with the
women known as Nyonyas and men Babas. They created a sophisticated and influential society, known
for their shrewd business acumen and opulent lifestyles. The golden age of the Peranakans was the
28 Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, p. 47.
29 Ibid., p. 60.
118
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period when their upper classes assimilated easily into British
colonial society, embracing Western ideas and evolving their own Malay dialect. The beginning of
the twentieth century also saw a gradual substitution of their language by the Hokkien dialect and the
conversion of many Peranakans from Buddhism to Christianity. One of their most enduring legacies
is their spicy cuisine, the result of the blending of Chinese and local Malay ingredients, another is the
colourful shophouses in which they lived and worked.
30 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi-
ronment, p. 143.
31 Quoted in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban
Built Environment, p. 245.
119
maintains, however, that all these words were adaptations of the Portuguese version of an older Spanish
word, varanda, which means railing, balustrade, or balcony32. In colonial Singapore, the term ‘verandah’
is more often used to refer to the continuous open pillared portico around colonial bungalows; the
arcade that runs across the front of a shophouse is invariably referred to as a ‘five-foot-way’.
The five-foot-way acted as a pavement, an almost unknown luxury before 1800 even in most
European cities, the fact that it was covered also provided an additional degree of comfort in a tropical
climate. This covered walkway was also a feature in some European cities, with examples in Turin,
Paris, and England (for example, the Rue de Rivoli in Paris, and the Rows in Chester and the Butterwalk
in Dartmouth)33. By the late-nineteenth century, the Singapore five-foot-way had become, as we have
seen, a contested space. The blurring of public and private that resulted from its ambiguous location at
the nexus of public thoroughfare and private retail space led to a conflict between shop owners and the
municipal authorities, culminating in what became known as the ‘Veranda Riots’ in February 188834.
These were a confrontation between the municipal authorities and the shopkeepers over the right to use
one particular element of public space – the five-foot-way – but which rapidly escalated into a battle
for control over the public streets and spaces of the city. The riots only ended when the authorities were
forced to adopt a much less stringent definition of what constituted a public right of way.
As we have also seen in Part I, the Chinese tend to draw less clear distinctions between what
constitutes public and private than do Europeans. Those who could afford larger houses were able
to avail themselves of the system of graduated privacy typical of the siheyuan or courtyard house as
inhabitants and visitors moved from the street into the heart of the house. In the Singapore shophouse
this transition was rapid, consisting simply of the narrow five-foot-way. As Yeoh notes, ‘the notion of a
boundary between the “private” house and the “public” street was always real and acknowledged, [but]
it tended to become less elaborate as wealth decreased’35. Singapore’s Asian communities tended to see
the five-foot-way in an ambivalent light, as a space capable of accommodating more than one use at
any given time; as such it was neither rigidly ‘public’ nor ‘private’, but sufficiently elastic to allow for
the co-existence of different definitions of use. In other words, it was as much a place as a passage. The
municipal authorities tried to strip it down to one simple function, that of circulation, (which would have
rendered them sterile, like the Modernist-inspired plazas in front of skyscrapers mentioned earlier), this
would have meant few people would ever linger on them. The municipal authorities saw the five-foot-
way as a space to move through not a place to be in.
The five-foot-way may have survived the riots of 1888 with its dynamism and vibrancy intact,
even enhanced, sadly it was to face another, even more serious challenge in the middle of the twentieth
century: that of destruction. We have already seen the massive rehousing of Singapore’s population in
the new towns undertaken by the Housing Development Board immediately after independence in 1965,
the corollary of this was the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s attempts to clear the city centre of slums,
replacing them for the most part with massive high-rise HBD housing blocks identical to those being
constructed in the suburbs and new towns. The shophouse was perceived as being unnecessary, out-
moded, and unhygienic. Significant portions of the city centre were destroyed, and not just shophouses,
but banks, department stores, government buildings, hotels, and schools all considered to have outlived
their usefulness were razed as well. This destruction came to a head with the demolition of the Raffles
Institution in the 1980s. This was Singapore’s premier boys’ school, and had been founded by Raffles
himself. Housed in a cluster of low-rise neoclassical buildings, of no great architectural distinction, their
destruction nonetheless provoked an outcry. The government took note and from that time on has made
an effort to rehabilitate and reuse the city’s existing buildings.
There have been some good and imaginative reuses made of the shophouse, often by foreigners
32 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi-
ronment, p. 271, endnote 13.
33 Ibid., p. 272, endnote 18.
34 Ibid., p. 252.
35 Ibid., p. 247.
120
(the ‘foreign talent’ the city so abundantly attracts). This destruction of colonial heritage would normally
be seen as a typically postcolonial reaction where these sorts of buildings were seen as reminders of
colonial oppression (as was the case with the Georgian buildings of Ireland, as shown earlier), but in
Singapore’s case this was anything but the case, the city, as we have seen, actively embraces its colo-
nial past. What probably happened here was a
Western-inspired desire for a Modernist-style
efficiency in urban planning which has resulted
in the destruction of large parts of a city centre
that was perceived as being outdated. Fortu-
nately it was stopped before it became too late.
Singapore still has a relatively intact colonial
core, unlike Hong Kong, which has altered it-
self beyond all recognition. Shanghai, too, has
a relatively intact colonial core, with municipal
authorities beginning to understand the value
this architectural heritage can bring to a city.
This part of the investigation began
with the idea that Shanghai could learn from
Figure 21. Plan of alleyway house cluster, Beijing Singapore’s more established pattern of reha-
Road West (source: Lao Shanghai Shikumen, p.15) bilitation and reuse for colonial-era buildings.
The shophouse, however, can never be an
effective model for the alleyway house due to one simple reason: the
different land-use pattern that obtain in these two cities. Singapore has
a straightforward grid of streets and roadways, Shanghai, as we have
seen, consists of blocks of alleyway houses, containing few entrances,
invariably gated, and with many dead-ends. Despite some superficial
architectural resemblances between these two typologies: the similarity
of their respective widths and heights, their use of Western neoclassi-
cal detailing, etc., the alleyway house is a completely different typol-
ogy from the shophouse. The semi-private/semi-public alleyway onto
which the alleyway house faces is always a step or two removed from
the public street, a degree of graduated privacy that the shophouse has
never enjoyed. And as a generator of social and family life the alley-
way house’s very success depended on this matrix of connections that
the alleyway enabled; again something the shophouse never had. Both
typologies may have been designed as private family homes, but the
Singapore shophouse always had a more overtly commercial aspect,
and it could simply never compete with the alleyway house for the
sheer vibrancy and richness of the street life it engendered. Of course,
as we have just seen, the five-foot-way did provide a certain blurring of
indoor and outdoor, public and private, but it never blossomed into the
rich social life that Shanghai’s alleyways possessed.
Whatever shortcomings the shophouse may have had vis-à-vis
the alleyway house in social terms, it is these very shortcomings that
Figure 22. Plan of alleyway
have been the reason it has been able to be rehabilitated and reused so
houses (source: Lao Shang-
effectively. The majority of these premises can easily be adapted for re-
hai Shikumen, p.17)
use as a family home, or as an office or retail or entertainment outlet in
a way that the labyrinthine alleyway house can never be.
Basically, Singapore’s shophouses are located on a grid of streets whereas Shanghai’s blocks of
alleyway houses can be likened to a tree structure, with branches growing ever smaller the farther away
they are from the trunk (i.e. the main road), and ending at the house itself. The pedestrian has no option
121
but to retrace their steps if they want to access the roadway again. This is nothing like Singapore where
virtually any shophouse can be easily accessed from practically any roadway, they all enjoy more or less
the same level of accessibility, which makes them more readily reusable. Shanghai’s alleyway houses
are organised in such a strict hierarchy of accessibility that they can never be reused in the Singapore
manner.
122
Conclusion to Part II
Part II of this thesis has dealt with colonialism, noting that Shanghai has been able to benefit from its co-
lonial history in its attempts to rejoin the global city network. Symbolism has long played an important
role in Chinese cities’ shapes, and the fact that pre-colonial Shanghai was round serves to highlight the
low-class status its merchant inhabitants were accorded in imperial China. In post-colonial terms 1943
saw the revocation of Shanghai’s treaty-port status and 1949 saw the city disappear behind the ‘bamboo
curtain’.
In examining the differences between colonialism and imperialism we saw John Darwin’s
tracing of Britain’s imperial trajectory by highlighting that country’s remarkable economic growth in
the nineteenth century, particularly the use of steam and coal, and the fact that the country was ruled
by a commercially minded ruling class. That Britain was able to amass such a vast empire resulted not
only from the new technologies engendered by this phenomenal economic growth, but also from the
century of peace that was enjoyed after the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Air travel had a devastating effect
on the maritime empires in the twentieth century, with the result that only two imperial systems are still
in existence today, both land-based ones: the United States and China. The high-tide mark of the British
Empire was identified as being 1929, not because of the Wall Street Crash but because Britain restored
tariff autonomy to China that year, and with the hand back of Wei Hai Wei the following year their vast
empire began to shrink.
Part II also looked at Hong Kong and Singapore, where we saw Ackbar Abbas’s ‘one system
at different stages of development’ in the former, and Manuel Castells’s administrative class of elite
Oxford and Cambridge civil servants who have so successfully served the business interests of both
cities. It was also noted that without the enviable geographical position enjoyed by both of these
cities, neither would have been developed in the first place. A useful comparison was drawn between
Shanghai’s alleyway house and the Singapore shophouse, particularly the latter’s five-foot-way, where
we saw the ease of access to the shophouse contrast starkly with the tree-like structure of the alleyway
house, which meant it was ruled out as a viable model for rehabilitation and reuse.
This section was not intended to be an apology for empire, simply an honest assessment of the
histories of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The British Empire left in its wake the use of the
English language, the rule of law, an elite civil service, not to mention the valuable infrastructural net-
works that underpin Saskia Sassen’s global cities. The French Empire did more or less the same thing,
although the use of French is now less significant internationally (this, however, is only a post-World
War II phenomenon). People are very quick to dismiss the overtly racist assumptions of the cultural
impositions of the imperial era: the ‘white man’s burden’ and the mission civilisatrice, yet if we take
France as an example, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, we have the poetry
of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé; the writings of Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Renan,
Michelet, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Daudet, Zola, Leautaud; then there were the composers such as
Saint-Saens and Bizet; and painters like Monet, Manet, Renoir, Courbet, Delacroix, Degas, et al. While
arrogance is never a pleasant feature, it is only fair to point out that with artists of that calibre France
can perhaps be forgiven for being proud of its culture.
123
PART III
MICHEL FOUCAULT
[A]nimals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs,
(e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j)
innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the
water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.
Jorge Luis Borges, from a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’1.
In this section Michel Foucault’s theories of space and power relations are applied to the built environ-
ment of Shanghai, particularly the alleyway house. First of all a little background information will be
given about Michel Foucault, as well as the intellectual climate in which he was writing (namely the
transition from Structuralism to Poststructuralism). Taking certain specific texts of Foucault as the point
of departure, primarily Discipline and Punish, where his theories of power relations are so specifically
and so spatially articulated, we will then go on to look at The History of Sexuality, Volume I, An Intro-
duction, as well as some of his other writings as they have appeared in various anthologies, (for exam-
ple, Power/Knowledge, etc.). Use will also be made of some of the lectures Foucault gave at the Collège
de France in the 1970s, particularly Security, Territory, Population, as well as some of the interviews he
gave (bearing in mind that in France, unlike in the Anglo-American academic tradition, the interview
tends to be regarded as a de facto publication).
Use will also be made, for the most part, of English translations of Michel Foucault’s writings,
however, for some of his more important points it is felt that it might be better to revert to the French
originals, to ensure that nothing has been ‘lost in translation’. It is this notion of translation that will
be returned to later in Part III as it paves the way to the subsequent and final part of the thesis, Part IV,
where even greater emphasis is placed on the difficulties of (in this case) ‘transliterating’ Western con-
cepts into the Chinese language.
Finally, to add to Michel Foucault’s justly famous methodologies of ‘archaeology’ and ‘geneal-
ogy’, a third method has been developed in this research, namely ‘consanguinity’. Unlike archaeology
and genealogy, which deal with the dead and the buried, consanguinity is primarily concerned with the
living. It investigates the links between different social, business, and familial networks in Shanghai’s
urban environment. This notion of consanguinity further represents the attempt to side-step the difficul-
ties that have beset so many of those who have attempted to make use of Michel Foucault’s theories in
the past. This phenomenon is known as the ‘toolkit’ approach, and is one that is fraught with danger. In
this regard Edward W. Said’s Orientalism will be highlighted, a wonderful work of literary criticism, but
as a usage of Foucault’s theory of discourse a sadly unbalanced polemic. In an attempt to give a more
balanced appraisal of some other Foucauldian commentators some of the more successful attempts at
applying his theories will also be highlighted, notably Brenda S.A. Yeoh, whom we have seen already in
our discussion of the Singapore shophouse, and David Grahame Shane, whose analysis of Hong Kong’s
(now demolished) Kowloon Walled City is an excellent and apposite use of the theory of the heteroto-
pia.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher who tried to show that basic ideas, normally
taken as permanent truths about human beings and their society, change over the course of history.
He was born in Poitiers, the son of a doctor, and educated at Paris. He attained a professorship at the
Collège de France in 1970: History of Systems of Thought. His work explored the shifting patterns of
power within society and the ways in which it relates to the self. He also studied how everyday practices
enable people to define their identities and systemise knowledge. His thinking is generally considered
to have developed in three distinct stages. In 1961 Madness and Civilisation was published (as Histoire
de la Folie à l’âge classique, it was translated into English in 1967), this was followed by The Birth
of the Clinic (published in 1963 as Naissance de la clinique: Une archéologie du regard médical, and
translated in 1973) where he traced changes in Western attitudes to madness. His second stage produced
The Order of Things (published in 1966 as Les mots et les choses, translated 1970) and its sequel The
Archaeology of Knowledge was published in 1969 as L’Archéologie du savoir (translated 1972). His
last period began with Discipline and Punish (published in 1975 as Surveiller et punir, translated 1976),
and asks whether imprisonment is really a more humane form of punishment than torture. His last three
books form an unfinished history of sexuality, beginning with The History of Sexuality, Volume I, An In-
troduction (published in 1976 as Histoire de la sexualité: La volonté de savoir, translated 1978).
His studies of madness, medicine, punishment, and sexuality were preoccupied with power
relations in controlling what constitutes reason, knowledge, and truth. As the homosexual son of a
provincial doctor in early twentieth-century France, Michel Foucault would no doubt have had an
uncomfortable time of it growing up, it must be stressed here, however, that Foucault’s private life is
not at issue here, nor the use of his thought that has been made in the field of gender studies, some of
which is valid, others, like James Miller’s misguided The Passion of Michel Foucault, is distasteful and
in some places actually even scurrilous. It should be pointed out, however, that the invidious position
in which a bright, sensitive young man would have found himself when forced to confront a dawning
sexuality in the climate of provincial Roman Catholic France may have played no small role in the
themes he chose to explore throughout his academic life. Foucault’s brilliance was that he was able to
lift his enquiries out of the merely specific and personal to address issues of universal importance.
Michel Foucault begins The Order of Things with the now famous quotation from Jorge Luis
Borges’s ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’:
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read
the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the
stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes
with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing
long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same
and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that
‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking
pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied,
(j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just
broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this
taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is
demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the
stark impossibility of thinking that.1
This one passage unites so many of the themes of this research that in many ways it is the heart
2 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. 298.
3 Ibid., p. 300.
4 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi-
ronment, p. 12.
126
have not read; genealogy is supposed to be ‘gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary’5. Foucault, as
we have seen, was clearly influenced by Jorge Luis Borges so it is interesting to see that Borges has also
stated that ‘there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition’6.
There is one thing, however, that this research seeks to avoid in Foucault’s work: his pessimism.
According to Marshall Berman ‘Foucault denies the possibility of any sort of freedom’, Berman
sees Foucault’s totalities as swallowing up every facet of modern life as he develops his themes with
obsessive relentlessness and ‘with sadistic flourishes, clamping his ideas down on his readers like iron
bars, twisting each dialectic to our flesh like a new turn of the screw’7. The possibility of gaining a
better understanding of the public life of a city like Shanghai is potentially liberating, even if taking an
analysis of the carceral society as a point of departure. Indeed, anything that advances our understanding
of the world must, by its very nature, be liberating.
[I]nsufficiently critical of his source material. He always seems to be able to find just what he
is looking for. Any evidence, however dubious, is acceptable so long as it fits with logically
calculated expectations; but wherever the data run counter to the theory Levi-Strauss will
either bypass the evidence or marshal the full resources of his powerful invective to have the
heresy thrown out of court.... [H]e consistently behaves like an advocate defending a cause
Vladimir Propp treated difference as no more than superficial, and yet difference was the key
to Saussure’s revolutionary theory of language. In looking below the surface appearance of things,
Propp and Levi-Strauss sought to uncover the universal structures that were embedded deep within
the human mind. Ironic, is it not, that Saussure’s attribution of meaning to difference should lead in
the end to a sort of lowest common denominator, an undifferentiated set of stories, devoid of anything
that actually made them special? This is what Roland Barthes has called the scrutiny of an ‘indifferent’
science (indifferent because it was undifferentiating, but also because it was boring).
For the poststructuralists what was important was not what exists, but what could accurately be
said to exist. Truths (or falsehoods) are told using language, and while poststructuralists do not deny
that there is a world out there, they are more concerned with what we can claim to know about it with
any certainty. Michel Foucault devoted most of his life’s work to analysing the effects culture has in
permitting us to give an account of ourselves. He was interested in societies’ agendas for disciplining the
body in order to construct a good citizen (i.e. ones who conform to its ‘norms’). The verb of choice here
is of course ‘to subject’, which, importantly, can also be used as a noun, a ‘subject’.
Anyone who tells or shows someone else how to do something is exerting a power over them;
the transmission of knowledge involves instruction; learning entails submission. The examination
system is a good example of this, in that it is the way in which a profession protects itself by making
sure those who seek to join it know what they are doing, and know how its language is conventionally
employed. But there is by definition no power without at least the possibility of resistance. Resistance is
power’s defining difference. But power is not a thing that can be possessed, at least according to Michel
Foucault, power is simply a set of relations.
Poststructuralism formed an integral part of postmodern theory. The post-World-War-II era of
great artists, such as Stockhausen, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, and Beuys, was succeeded, in turn, by an
influential group of French theorists including Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and
Michel Foucault, all of whom began their careers by examining the implications of High Modernism.
Christopher Butler has helpfully identified Althusser as being concerned with Brecht, Barthes with
Flaubert and Proust, Derrida with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Mallarmé, and Foucault with Nietzsche
and Bataille9.
By the time of the student uprisings in Paris in 1968, philosophical thought had moved away
from the fashionable existentialism of the post-war period (of the sort expounded by Jean-Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus) towards a more sceptical stance. This came to be known as deconstructive
and poststructuralist, and spread to the English-speaking world amid the gloom and doom of the
1970s, where they seemed to resonate with a deeper truth. Christopher Butler has also identified this
postmodernist period as being one in which the work of academics dominated over that of actual
artists. Eschewing the ‘brave new world’ of High Modernism, where everything in society could be
fixed (if only people would live up to the architects’ vision), there was a general feeling that these sort
of ‘metanarratives’ (like the claims of the structuralists) were too simplistic, too idealistic, too utopian.
Jean-Francois Lyotard argued in his La condition postmoderne (published in French in 1979, and
translated into English in 1984) that the legitimising ‘master narratives’ were in crisis and decline. The
two main narratives that Lyotard was attacking were the Marxist notion of utopia, and the triumph of
science, which he considered to have lost their credibility since World War II. To put it simply, Lyotard
defined postmodernism as an incredulity towards metanarratives.
One of the chief figures around whom postmodernism coalesced, at least in the English-speaking
world, was Charles Jencks. Jencks saw postmodernism as a movement that had remained a diffuse
series of trends in the arts but that had quite quickly crystallised into an architectural movement during
10 Charles Jencks, Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, pp. 26-27.
11 Ibid., p. 27.
12 Ibid., p. 27.
13 Ibid., p. 27.
14 Ibid., p. 27.
129
Before ending this brief chapter on poststructuralism, it might be interesting to point out one
other interesting coincidence, which no discussion of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project can omit. That is
the fact that it was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the same architect who designed New York’s World
Trade Centre (which was blown up by terrorists on 11 September 2001). How odd that the same man
should be responsible for both of these buildings, the destruction of which have gone down in recent
history as some of the West’s most decisive moments.
130
2 ANOTHER POWER, ANOTHER KNOWLEDGE
According to Michel Foucault, things generally start badly, and then get worse. His questioning of
whether the more humane forms of punishment that came to replace the torture of the Middle Ages
were actually the advance they seemed have profound implications for our understanding of society,
because the newer disciplines that resulted from this change were then able to recruit subjects far more
effectively than the older and more overt displays of power.
Michel Foucault’s exploration of the relationship between discourse and power has been
identified by Christopher Butler, among others, as one of the most important ethical arguments
in postmodernism. A ‘discourse’ is understood to mean a set of interlocking and mutually
supporting statements that have evolved over time, and which can be used to define and describe any
given subject matter.
A discourse is what Christopher Butler calls ‘the language of the main intellectual
disciplines, for example the “discursive practices” of law, medicine, aesthetic judgement, and so
on’1. Butler sees discourse as being like a Derridean language, one that is not simply the property of
controlling individuals because it goes beyond them. The more dominant a discourse is within a society,
the more natural it will seem, and the more people will tend to justify it on the grounds that it is natural.
This is why Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia seems so funny, because, as Foucault so delightedly points
out, no one could possibly think like that. But they do, and to people like the Chinese our ways of
doing things can seem every bit as odd. It is this awareness of difference that can also result in negative
consequences, because on the one hand we may think of another society’s way of doing things as quaint,
but so often this quaintness can turn into something threatening, as we will see in Part IV when we look
at how the eighteenth-century’s chinoiserie turned into the nineteenth-century’s ‘Yellow Peril’.
Michel Foucault’s studies of the histories of law, of penology, and of medicine saw these
disciplines as being powerful discourses which were designed to exclude or control people (such as
the criminal or the mentally ill). Foucault saw the insane and the criminal as society’s victims, and
took the victims’ position in analysing power, which he did from the bottom up. He saw it as anything
but the simple imposition of a will from above. Foucault was opposed to the Whiggish version of
history, where everything was seen as leading up to the glorious moment of our own present time,
instead he chronicled the rise of what Christopher Butler calls ‘unfreedom’, in doing this, he examines
what he called the episteme, the ‘largely unconscious assumptions concerning intellectual order that
underlie the historical states of particular societies’2. For Foucault discourse was something that has
tangible effects, because it actually helped to create the subordinate identities of those it excluded
from participating in it, in other words it got to define who was mad, or normal, or criminal, and then
decide whether these people could be useful members of society (or not) based on these definitions.
Foucault’s work, particularly The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction is actually a critique of
Marxism, his brilliant move was to steer clear of the more usual focus on class relations and concentrate
instead on more abstract notions of power. This has led some commentators, notably Terry Eagleton
in The Illusions of Postmodernism, to accuse Foucault of objecting to regimes of power simply on the
grounds that they are regimes as such, and hence repressive; this misses the point, the main thrust of
Foucault’s investigations was to examine the dynamics of power relations, not merely some specific
examples of them.
11 Brian Massumi’s translation of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia notes that Deleuze
and Guattari’s use of puissance also signifies this potential or capacity, much like the German Macht (which
Massumi also notes derives from Nietzsche).
12 Hyacinthe Rigaud’s 1701 portrait of the king prominently displays the ageing monarch’s still shapely
legs, something the king seems to have been still clearly proud of.
13 Arie Graafland, Versailles and the Mechanics of Power: The Subjugation of Circe: An Essay, diagram pp.
64-65.
14 Madame de Maintenon was known as the Indian Princess because she had been born in one of France’s
colonies in India.
15 ‘I depart, but the state shall always remain.’
133
difficult business. This is why this study has been at such pains to point out the provenance of the
English versions of some of Foucault’s terms (especially as the French for ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’
are open to such a variety of interpretations for the simple reason that there are more words for them in
French than in English). The same applies to the word ‘space’ (more on which in a moment), and even a
word such as the ‘everyday’ (which can be translated as tous les jours or quotidien in French – and even
this latter word tends to capture more nuance than its English counterpart). One other important term is
dispositif. The English word ‘apparatus’ is the most usual translation, certainly it seems to best capture
the French meaning of the term, it is also the word most commonly used to render this idea into English.
It must be pointed out, however, that even Foucault himself has used the more usual appareil when
referring to an apparatus (as he does when mentioning ‘a regulatory apparatus’ in Lecture Number Three
(25 January 1978) as published in Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France
1977-78, (edited by Michel Senellart and translated by Graham Burchell))16.
Finally, we come to two of the most important terms in Michel Foucault’s work: archaeology and
genealogy. Archaeology seems to have been used early in his work almost as an alternative to history,
and during the 1960s it came to occupy a central role. Foucault claims he is justified in using the term
archaeology to describe his research because he examines archives, his choice of the term, however,
has caused some misunderstanding: it is neither the search for an origin, as in the Greek arche, nor is it
related to geological excavation. Foucault’s idea of an archaeology of thought is seen by many as being
close to the modernist literary idea of language being a source of thought in its own right, not simply
an instrument for expressing ideas. Foucault’s idea seems to be that every mode of thinking involves
implicit rules (sometimes rules that those who use them cannot even formulate), and that these rules
materially restrict the range of thought. In seeking to uncover these rules we should be able to see how
a seemingly arbitrary constraint can actually make sense within such a framework. Just as Borges’s
Chinese encyclopaedia seems haphazard and arbitrary to us, representing a way of thinking that is alien
to the West, so too will our own ways seem odd and arbitrary to the Chinese. As indeed will our own
ways seem to those who follow us (even in the West), because rules which govern our behaviour change
over time, so one day in the future our own way of doing things will seem as quaint and arbitrary to our
descendants as our own ancestors’ do to us.
Just as modernist writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Natalie Saurault aimed at writing
without the author, Foucault’s archaeology aims at history without the subject. Conventional historians
treats history as a story, chronicling the lives of individual subjects as they move through time. The
worst excesses of this approach can be seen in the Whiggish interpretation of history, which sees
everything that has gone before as nothing but a prelude to our own glorious present. (The term
‘Whiggish’ refers to the ideology of the British Whig Party, and is most famously illustrated by Lord
Macaulay’s History of England.) Foucault’s archaeological period consisted of The History of Madness,
The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge. All four address
scientifically based practices of exclusion; all show a profound respect for the period of the French
Revolution; and all deal with the tacit relationships between such seemingly unrelated fields as clinical
16 French and English are so closely related as to lull those engaged in a desultory reading of texts in either
language into a false sense of similarity. But they are not the same. To take an example, the novel Sylvie by Ge-
rard de Nerval (a writer whom Foucault referred to in his own work, probably because he was a colourful eccen-
tric – de Nerval used to take his ‘pet’ lobster out for a walk on a long pink ribbon, on the very valid grounds that
people’s choices of pets were arbitrary, which would also tie in rather neatly to Foucault’s notion of what would
be considered a ‘norm’ as a pet). De Nerval’s novel opens with the line ‘J’ai sortais du theatre’, which to all in-
tents and purposes is untranslatable into English, at least directly. Nerval has made elegant use of the tense known
as the past imperfect, one that loosens a reader’s sense of time, moving as it does in some vaguely defined past; a
time before the present but we do not know exactly when, or for how long the events went on for. This sentence
is difficult to render into English for the simple reason that the English language does not possess a past imperfect
tense, hence the best that can be done is to say something like: ‘I left the theatre that I used to go to regularly’,
which is somewhat less than poetic, certainly it lacks the nuance of de Nerval’s lovely prose. Furthermore, it is
not even particularly succinct.
134
medicine, the medicalisation of madness, and the scientific status of various social inquiries, all of
which have more in common with each other than with anything that went before.
With genealogy Foucault tried to show how social and moral norms were really transfer nodes
in the relations of power. We find this methodology used in Discipline and Punish and The History
of Sexuality. As we have already seen, Foucault called genealogy ‘grey, meticulous, and patiently
documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have
been scratched over and recopied many times’17. It ‘…requires patience and a knowledge of details,
and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material’18. ‘[G]enealogy demands relentless erudition.
Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might
compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical
deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search
for “origins”.’19 According to Foucault, ‘the genealogist sets out to study the beginning – numberless
beginnings, whose faint traces and hints of colour are readily seen by a historical eye’20. The genealogist
‘…must be able to recognize the events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and
unpalatable defeats – the basis of all beginnings, atavisms, and heredities’21.
Friedrich Nietzsche
According to Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault was ‘clearly impressed by and adopted Friedrich
Nietzsche’s technique of looking for power behind sciences, religions, and other cognitive authorities
that present themselves as grounded in nothing more the force of disinterested evidence and argument’22.
Another area in which Foucault’s genealogy clearly evokes Friedrich Nietzsche is the claim that there is
an intimate link between knowledge and power. A claim developed by Foucault to show that changes in
thought are not due to thought itself but are caused by social forces that control individuals’ behaviour.
Some commentators have dated Foucault’s interest in Nietzsche from Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and
Philosophy which was published in 1962, others maintain that Foucault had started to read Nietzsche as
early as 1953, and continued to do so throughout the writing of Madness and Civilisation (1955-60). (It
is also probably of some interest to point out here that Foucault spent those five years living in Sweden,
hence away from the French intellectual scene.)
Whichever is the case is of no particular moment, the important point is that Foucault was
heavily influenced by Nietzsche, particularly the problem of the ‘value of values’, as well as the
evaluation from which they arise (the problem of their creation). Since this creation was primarily
explained by Nietzsche in terms of force or will, he was for Foucault (as well as for Deleuze) the
philosopher of ‘the will to power’. Which can clearly be seen in the subtitle to the French edition of The
History of Sexuality, Volume I, An Introduction which is La volonté de savoir (the will to knowledge).
As Michel Foucault himself writes:
In a sense, genealogy returns to the three modalities of history that Nietzsche recognized in 1874.
It returns to them in spite of the objections that Nietzsche raised in the name of the affirmative
and creative powers of life. But they are metamorphosed: the veneration of monuments becomes
parody; the respect for ancient continuities becomes systematic dissociation; the critique of the
injustices of the past by a truth held by men in the present becomes the destruction of the man
who maintains knowledge by the injustice proper to the will to knowledge23.
17 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader (Paul Rabinow, ed.), p. 76.
18 Ibid., pp. 76-77.
19 Ibid., p. 77.
20 Ibid., p. 81.
21 Ibid., p. 80.
22 Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction, p. 51.
23 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader (Paul Rabinow, ed.), p. 97.
135
It must be remembered that Nietzsche uses the word Ursprung interchangeably with the more
neutral Herkunft, thus the origin of good and evil has an Ursprung, origin or source, but also an
Herkunft, or descent or ancestry. Again we find ourselves constantly returning to the importance of
having a clear translation. However, Foucault sees the words Entstehung and Herkunft as being more
exact than Ursprung in recording the true objective of genealogy, because while they are both originally
translated as ‘origin’, he seeks to ‘reestablish their proper use’24. Entstehung designates emergence, or
the moment of arising; while Herkunft is the equivalent of stock or descent, which Foucault sees as ‘…
the ancient affiliation to a group, sustained by the bonds of blood, tradition, or social class’25. ‘The body
– and everything that touches it: diet, climate, and soil – is the domain of the Herkunft.’26 Hence there
can be a Herkunft for the social life in a city, and it is this that is being investigated in this analysis of
Shanghai’s alleyway housing.
Genealogy, as Foucault sees it, is ‘an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation
of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of
history’s destruction of the body’27. It ‘does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken
continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that
the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed
a predetermined form on all its vicissitudes’28. This, interestingly, is a concept of time that resonates
strongly with the Chinese for whom notions of time are very concrete. The Chinese approach to history
is to see it as a normative pattern and not a series of discrete and disconnected events; the past and the
present engage in a complex dialogue where the past is never static but is part of a living tradition that
continues into the present29.
As far as Foucault is concerned, any examination of a descent will also permit ‘…the discovery,
under the unique aspect of a trait or a concept, of the myriad events through which – thanks to which,
against which – they were formed’30. Foucault is at pains to point out that it would be wrong to search
for an uninterrupted continuity in any descent, because ‘…we should avoid thinking of emergence as
the final term of a historical development’31. ‘The role of genealogy is to record its history: the history of
morals, ideals, and metaphysical concepts, the history of the concept of liberty or of the ascetic life; as
they stand for the emergence of different interpretations, they must be made to appear as events on the
stage of historical process.’32 And this is what has been attempted in this research into Shanghai.
Although genealogy is sometimes seen as a replacement for archaeology (the fact that it follows
on from this earlier method seems to suggest it might be), but in fact it is probably better to see the two
methodologies as being side by side; as being the two halves of a complementary approach. Before we
turn to Foucault’s texts there is one final term that must be noted: ‘space’. Again we should consider that
the French espace captures a wider range of meanings than does the English word.
Foucault may have shared the structuralists’ predilection for spatial metaphors, but he was the
only thinker to analyse actual spaces – perhaps this explains his fascination for architects. Whereas
Foucault wrote only a small number of pieces that actually directly address space, the language of the
works of his archaeological period is quite overtly spatialised, with terms such as ‘limit’, ‘boundary’,
‘transgression’, ‘threshold’, etc. Foucault conceived of madness and illness in spatial terms, and
24 Ibid., p. 80.
25 Ibid., p. 81.
26 Ibid., p. 83.
27 Ibid., p. 83.
28 Ibid., p. 81.
29 Gregory Bracken, ‘The past is never past: making sense of Chinese time’, IIAS Newsletter, Number 46,
p. 34.
30 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in The Foucault Reader (Paul Rabinow, ed.) , p. 81.
31 Ibid., p. 83.
32 Ibid., p. 86.
136
examined the groups that inhabited liminal areas. Foucault tended not to see space as just another area to
be analysed, it was a central tenet of his methodological approach. As Foucault himself states, ‘no one is
responsible for an emergence; no one can glory in it, since it always occurs in the interstice’33, and that:
This relationship of domination is no more a ‘relationship’ than the place where it occurs is a
place; and, precisely for this reason, it is fixed, throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous
procedures that impose rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves
memories on things and even within bodies. It makes itself accountable for debts and gives rise
to the universe of rules, which is by no means designed to temper violence, but rather to satisfy
it.34
Which brings us to the notion of history, where Foucault asks how we can define the relationship
between genealogy (as an examination of Herkunft and Entstehung) and history. He suggests we could
examine Nietzsche’s ‘celebrated apostrophes against history’, but decided that these had better be put
aside while considering genealogy as a ‘wirkliche Historie’ instead, a characterisation of history as a
‘spirit’ or ‘sense’35.
History in the traditional sense, at least according to Foucault, ‘…finds its support outside of
time and pretends to base its judgments on an apocalyptic objectivity. This is only possible, however,
because its belief in eternal truth, the immortality of the soul, and the nature of consciousness as always
identical to itself’36. Historians ‘take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their
grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy – the unavoidable obstacles
of their passion’37, but as he then points out, ‘[t]he forces operating in history are not controlled by
destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conditions’38; it ‘…has a more important
task than to be a handmaiden to philosophy, to recount the necessary birth of truth and values; it
should become a differential knowledge of energies and failings, heights and degenerations, poisons
and antidotes’39.
In pointing out that the body obeys the ‘exclusive laws of physiology’ Foucault seems to think
historians are letting it escape from the influence of history, but this is false. ‘The body is moulded by a
great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned
by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances.’40 Foucault’s work
was intimately concerned with the body, particularly the body in particular spaces. He was profoundly
interested in what he called ‘dividing practices’, one of the most famous examples of which was the
confining of the poor, the insane, and the vagabonds in Paris in the seventeenth century. Foucault saw
this as a follow-on from the isolation of lepers during the Middle Ages. Later, the processes of social
objectification and categorisation – including the medicalisation, stigmatisation, and normalisation
of deviance, sexual or otherwise – meant that human beings were given both a social and a personal
identity. These were modes of manipulation that combined the mediation of science (or, in the case of
psychiatry, a pseudo-science) and the actual practices of exclusion, usually spatial, and invariably social.
These dividing practices form a substantial part of Foucault’s archaeological period.
Michel Foucault’s spatialised thinking also found expression in other ways, his analysis of
Velasquez’s Las Meninas in The Order of Things is an elegant case in point. A court painter during the
reign of King Philip IV, Spain’s ‘Golden Age’, Valezquez’s bravura technique exactly suited the era in
33 Ibid., p. 85.
34 Ibid., p. 85.
35 Ibid., p. 86.
36 Ibid., p. 87.
37 Ibid., p. 90.
38 Ibid., p. 88.
39 Ibid., p. 90.
40 Ibid., p. 87.
137
which he was working. Las Meninas is remarkable for its seeming ability to speak to our own age so
profoundly. Foucault’s brilliant analysis of it draws particular attention to the painting’s eerily empty
heart with the mirror (we shall be seeing more on mirrors at the end of Part IV when examining M.
Christine Boyer’s analysis of Zhang Yimou’s film Shanghai Triad), the main point here is to highlight
the fact that Foucault’s spatialised thinking could embrace fields that have surprised many, even his
critics.
And while on the subject of criticism, there is one final point that must be mentioned before we
move onto Foucault’s texts, and that is the fact that his work has often been attacked for containing er-
rors. There are few people who can produce a work that does not contain at least some errors; critics,
however, seem to latch onto anything that can discredit the person they are criticising. The fact that Fou-
cault may have made some factual errors over his many years of writing is really of very little moment.
One such error that seems to have been missed by his more trenchant critics is where Foucault states
that the British ended the practice of transportation in 180741 – in fact the transportation of criminals
(such as the Irish to Australia, and Indians to Malaya, etc.) was not outlawed until 1867 – what Foucault
may have been confusing it with was slavery, which the British did abolish in 1807. But these sorts of
quiddities leave the main thrust of Foucault’s work unaffected, one of the main themes of which is the
fact that space is inherently political, and politics is inherently spatial.
Archaeological works
The modern era has been characterised by the exercise of power which is itself invisible but which
controls its subjects by rendering them visible. This contrasts with the premodern period, when the
exercise of power was a highly visible affair: public executions, the presence of military in towns,
etc. Each of us is subject to modern power, yet with that power being dispersed throughout society
there seems to be no single centre around which to focus, there is no longer a privileged ‘us’ against a
marginalised ‘them’, or vice versa.
Gary Gutting thinks this dispersion is the result of there no longer being a teleology behind
power’s development, no dominating class or world-historical process; modern power is the outcome
of numerous small, uncoordinated causes: in brief, it is the result of chance. Foucault’s portrayal of
modern power challenges the tenets of, in particular, Marxism, which tended to identify specific groups
and institutions (for example, the bourgeoisie, the central bank, the government press, etc.) as sources of
domination, the destruction or appropriation of which would lead to liberation. This is why the offices of
just such organisations were invariably seized during revolutions, Dublin’s General Post Office was the
locus of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising. What might the world’s revolutionaries seize today? The Internet
café? hardly likely. This probably reflects one of the fundamental societal changes that Manuel Castells
has so expertly shown, and is the very reason that authorities in places like China are so wary of letting
citizens have unfettered access to the World Wide Web.
Michel Foucault’s great move was to show that marginalised groups and individuals are in fact
a part of society, even if they differ from the norm (like homosexuals, members of esoteric religions, or
immigrants, etc.). They speak society’s language, share, if not all, at least many of its values, and play
an essential social and economic role in its well being. The danger is, as we have seen in Part I, that
many of these individuals are once again finding themselves increasingly marginalised, pushed into the
analogue archipelago by the new face of global capitalism. There is yet another danger related to this:
we must be wary of trying to speak for these groups because the very act of ‘our’ claiming to speak for
‘them’ may further marginalise them, thus undoing any good that was intended.
Madness and Civilisation begins with a cursory survey of madness in the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, a time when it was seen as being part of the human experience; an alternative way
of being, rather than something dangerous that should be locked away. Indeed exhibitions of strange
55 Ibid., p. xix.
56 Ibid., p. xix.
57 Ibid., p. xix.
58 Ibid., p. xiv.
59 Ibid., p. xiv.
60 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 234.
61 Ibid., p. 11.
62 Ibid., p. 201.
63 Ibid., p. 200.
64 Ibid., pp. 200-201.
141
priority to the observing subject, attributing a constituent role to an act, which ends up placing its own
point of view as the origin of all historicity, hence leading to a transcendental consciousness65.
The Archaeology of Knowledge was seen by Foucault as unifying and clarifying what he called
the ‘imperfect sketches’ of his three earlier books of the archaeological period. An enterprise where he
tried to measure the mutations that operated in the field of history; where those methods, along with
the limits and themes of the history of ideas were questioned; where anthropological constraints were
thrown off, and an attempt was made to show how they had come about in the first place. Foucault’s
archaeology was not trying to define ‘the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that
are concealed or revealed in discourses’66, but wanted to define the discourses themselves, to show them
as practices that obeyed certain rules, and to show in what way these sets of rules were irreducible to
any other. Archaeology was also ‘…more willing than the history of ideas to speak of discontinuities,
ruptures, gaps, entirely new forms of positivity, and of sudden redistributions’67.
As Foucault says, ‘[t]he frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines,
and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a
system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network’68. This
network of references is not like a mathematical treatise, nor a textual commentary, neither is it like
an historical account, nor an episode in a novel cycle; as Foucault states, ‘[t]he book is not simply the
object that one holds in one’s hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it:
its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it
indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse’69.
It is up to the scholar to reconstitute it as a unity, using their own words, and based on their
own research, in order that they can place their own new-won knowledge properly within the ever-
changing taxonomy of the world. This is the first stage of what this study has been attempting in
Shanghai: what Foucault would call a questioning of the already-said at the level of its existence, as
well as the enunciative function within which it operates, and the general archive system to which it
belongs; and in so doing the researcher can claim support by ‘[t]he right of words – which is not that
of the philologists – [which] authorizes, therefore, the use of the term archaeology to describe all these
searches’70.
Genealogical works
From the start, Discipline and Punish was seen as a seminal work of radical social criticism, its most
striking thesis was that the disciplinary techniques introduced for criminals become the model for
schools, hospitals, and factories, etc., so that a prison-like discipline came to pervade all of modern
society: what Foucault calls the ‘carceral archipelago’ in which we all live. Basically it questions the
assumption that imprisonment rather than the torturing of criminals is the enlightened and progressive
development it seems to be. Foucault seems to find this so-called development as a way not to punish
less but to punish better.
Because punishment in the pre-modern era violently assaulted the criminal’s body, society was
attempting to achieve its retribution through pain. Modern methods of punishment, however, demand
something subtler: an inner transformation, a conversion of the criminal, who must be sorry for what
they have done, and must repent (note that the word ‘penitent’ is where the ‘penitentiary’ as a prison
came from). Discipline and Punish is a genealogy rather than an archaeology because it is concerned
with practices and institutions rather than experiences and ideas.
143
3 PUNISHMENT AND DISCIPLINE
Michel Foucault said that in writing about the history of the prison he was ‘writing the history of the
present’1; he was not interested in the past, except as a means of writing such a history. He also notes
that his study of the birth of the prison took account only of the French penal system, he thought that
the ‘[d]ifferences in historical developments and institutions would make a detailed comparative
examination too burdensome and any attempt to describe the phenomenon as a whole too schematic’2.
He does note that:
In France, as in most European countries, with the notable exception of England, the entire
criminal procedure, right up to the sentence, remained secret: that is to say, opaque, not only
to the public but also to the accused himself. It took place without him, or at least without his
having any knowledge either of the charges or of the evidence. In the order of criminal justice,
knowledge was the absolute privilege of the prosecution.3
He also thinks it typical that the administration of prisons in France was for a long time the
responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior, while that of the bagnes (penal servitude on convict ships
and in penal colonies) lay with either the Ministry of the Navy or the Colonies.
It is interesting that he should mention these two things, one, the difference with the English
criminal justice system, and two, the differentiation between prisons in France itself and her colonies.
As we have already seen, the British often transported their criminals to penal colonies, such as
Australia. They ended this practice in 1867 (a mere four years before their turn to imperialism). France
also had penal colonies: Devil’s Island in French Guyana was the most notorious. Convicts who were
sent there were stripped of their rights as French citizens, they were literally stripped naked before they
left French soil, and once in Guyana and had served their sentence they were required to eke out an
existence for the same number of years as their prison sentence while remaining in the colony, many
people, unsurprisingly, ended up back ‘inside’. W. Somerset Maugham has written a number of chilling
short stories describing life in this colony in the 1930s, not his most celebrated work perhaps, but worth
reading for the insights they give into this overlooked part of the French criminal justice system. Michel
Foucault was well aware that he was overlooking some elements in his investigation of power relations,
so he deliberately chose examples from ‘military, medical, educational and industrial institutions’ as
his examples while noting that ‘[o]ther examples might have been taken from colonization, slavery and
child rearing’4.
This history of the prison, Panopticism as Foucault called it, had received little attention up to
the time of writing his book, certainly when he compared it to ‘the mining industries, the emerging
chemical industries or methods of national accountancy’ or ‘the blast furnaces or the steam engine’5.
This is no longer the case, there are endless references to Foucault’s pessimistic view of Western
society: the carceral archipelago, the society of surveillance, etc., what is being investigating here is
Foucault’s method of working in order to apply its principles to this research into Shanghai, particularly
the alleyway house, so that we can get a better picture of what is going on there, and try and find out
what made it work so well.
Punishment
6 Ibid., p. 136.
7 Ibid., p. 30.
8 Ibid., p. 16.
9 G. de Mably quoted in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, p. 16.
10 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 23.
11 Ibid., p. 19.
12 Ibid., p. 19.
13 Ibid., p. 53.
14 Ibid., p. 55.
15 Ibid., p. 60.
145
even if bravado did lead some of them to call the king rude names (the crime of lese majesty was once
though to be serious), but even this bravado was nothing more than a pathetic gesture, helpless and
futile; as an exhibition of saturnalia, momentary or otherwise, it hardly merits the name.
What the spectacle did provide, however, was a visible culmination of the ritual of the
investigation with a ceremony in which the sovereign was soon to triumph. What is interesting here
is the use of the word ‘investigation’. Foucault maintains that the spectacle that had surrounded the
criminal was transposed to another class by the emergence in the nineteenth century of the genre known
as crime literature. The newspapers took over the task of recounting the ‘grey, unheroic details of
everyday crime and punishment’16, whereas the crime novel also flourished because people had been
robbed of the old pride in crimes. As Foucault says, ‘the great murders had become the quiet game of
the well behaved’17. In crime literature, crime is glorified, because ‘it is one of the fine arts, because
it can be the work only of exceptional natures, because it reveals the monstrousness of the strong and
powerful, because villainy is yet another mode of privilege’18. With no more popular heroes or great
executions, with the ‘man of the people’ now too simple to be the protagonist of subtle truths, this new
genre, with its wickedly intelligent criminals, and even more devilishly clever detectives, answered a
deep-seated need in society, that of seeing the wicked getting what they deserve. As Foucault says:
[F]rom the adventure story to de Quincey, or from the Castle of Otranto to Baudelaire, there is
a whole aesthetic rewriting of crime, which is also the appropriation of criminality in acceptable
forms. In appearance, it is the discovery of the beauty and greatness of crime; in fact, it is
the affirmation that greatness too has a right to crime and that it even becomes the exclusive
privilege of those who are really great. The great murders are not for the pedlars of petty crime.
While, from Gaboriau onwards, the literature of crime follows this first shift: by his cunning,
his tricks, his sharp-wittedness, the criminal represented in this literature has made himself
impervious to suspicion; and the struggle between two pure minds – the murderer and the
detective will constitute the essential form of the confrontation19.
While this is a theme that can only be considered of secondary importance in a work like Discipline and
Punish it is obviously important enough for Foucault to return to it later in the book where he states:
The crime novel, which began to develop in the broadsheet and in mass-circulation literature,
assumed an apparently opposite role. Above all, its function was to show that the delinquent
belonged to an entirely different world, unrelated to familiar, everyday life. This strangeness
was first that of the lower depths of society (Les Mysteres de Paris, Rocambole), then that of
madness (especially in the latter half of the century) and lastly that of crime in high society
(Arsene Lupin). The combination of the fait divers and the detective novel has produced for the
last hundred years or more an enormous mass of ‘crime stories’ in which delinquency appears
both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in
its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place. Through
the importance attributed to it and the surfeit of discourse surrounding it, a line is traced round it
which, while exalting it, sets it apart20.
Michel Foucault’s point about the investigation was that he saw the sovereign power as
‘arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth by a number of regulated techniques’21. As a
16 Ibid., p. 69.
17 Ibid., p. 69.
18 Ibid., p. 69.
19 Ibid., pp. 68-69.
20 Ibid., p. 286.
21 Ibid., p. 225.
146
procedure it had developed with the reorganisation of the Church and the increase in the power of the
princely states in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At that time it permeated the jurisprudence of the
ecclesiastical courts, and then the lay ones. Investigation was an authoritarian search for truth and as
such was thus opposed to ‘the old procedures of the oath, the ordeal, the judicial duel, the judgement
of God or even of the transaction between private individuals’22. Today the investigation is an integral
part of Western justice, but Foucault does not want us to forget ‘either its political origin, its link with
the birth of the states and of monarchical sovereignty, or its later extension and its role in the formation
of knowledge’23. This is something he explores in great detail in both The History of Sexuality trilogy as
well as his lectures at the Collège de France, which we will be examining later in this chapter.
According to Foucault, the investigation was also a fundamental, albeit crude, element
in the constitution of empirical science, which Foucault sees in the juridico-political matrix of
this experimental knowledge, which grew rapidly at the end of the Middle Ages, and was seen as
springing from practices of investigation (in much the same way that mathematics in ancient Greece
was born from techniques of measurement). Although he later states that ‘[t]he great investigation that
gave rise to the sciences of nature has become detached from its politico-juridical model’, he sees the
examination, as ‘still caught up in disciplinary technology’24. He even goes so far as to say that ‘…
the examination has remained extremely close to the disciplinary power that shaped it’25. This is an
important concept. We already saw the importance of the examination at the beginning of this section as
the means by which a profession ensures the competence of its members, and we will return to it later
when we get to the Panopticon.
Power relations
Foucault saw the body as being ‘directly involved in a political field; power relations have an
immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform
ceremonies, to emit signs’26. He took as his point of departure Rusche and Kirchheimer’s examination
of prisons where he saw them as relating different systems of punishment within the systems of
production. A slave economy used punitive measures to provide a workforce (as we have already seen
in the Caribbean sugar colonies); feudalism saw an increase in corporal punishments, because the
body was the most accessible property; forced labour in prison appeared with the development of the
market economy. The nineteenth-century’s industrial revolution required a free market in labour hence
forced labour ceased to be a feature of punishment, with corrective detention taking its place. So, as the
economic take-off of the West was based on techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital,
the methods for administering accumulations of manpower provided the impetus for a parallel take-off
in relation to the more traditional, ritual, costly, and violent forms of power, which fell into desuetude, to
be superseded by a subtler, more calculated technology of subjection.
Michel Foucault saw these two processes – the accumulation of men and the accumulation of
capital – as inseparable. As he says, ‘it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the
accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining
them and using them. Conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful
accelerated the accumulation of capital’27. These techniques had a long history, what was new in the
eighteenth century was the combination and generalisation by which they attained a level whereby the
formation of knowledge and the increase of power reinforced each another in a new sort of symbiosis.
This is where the disciplines crossed what Foucault calls ‘the “technological” threshold’, and he states:
22 Ibid., p. 225.
23 Ibid., p. 225.
24 Ibid., p. 227.
25 Ibid., p. 226.
26 Ibid., p. 25.
27 Ibid., p. 221.
147
First the hospital, then the school, then, later, the workshop were not simply ‘reordered’ by the
disciplines; they became, thanks to them, apparatuses such that any mechanism of objectification
could be used in them as an instrument of subjection, and any growth of power could give rise
in them to possible branches of knowledge; it was this link, proper to the technological systems,
that made possible within the disciplinary element the formation of clinical medicine, psychiatry,
child psychology, educational psychology, the rationalization of labour.28
The political investment of the body was bound up with a series of complex reciprocal
relationships. The body’s economic use, as a force of production, became invested with relations
of power and domination, but its constitution as labour power was possible only within a system of
subjection; hence in Foucault’s formulation, it became ‘a useful force only if it is both a productive body
and a subjected body’29. What is important here is the fact that this subjection is not only obtained by
the instruments of violence or ideology but can also be as a result of a direct, physical pitting of force
against force, (without actually involving any violence). Organised, calculated, and technically thought
out, this knowledge of the body constitutes what Foucault calls ‘the political technology of the body’30.
This technology is diffuse, rarely can it be formulated in a continuous or systematic discourse. Made
up of disparate tools or methods, it cannot be localised in any particular institution or state apparatus.
What is operating here is what Foucault calls ‘a micro-physics of power’31, which presupposes that the
power being exercised on the body is not so much a property as a strategy; its effects of domination
are achieved through manoeuvres and tactics; a network of relations, constantly in tension as they are
activated, rather than the more usual understanding of a privilege that can be possessed. Hence power is
exercised, it is not the possession of a privileged elite, it is, in short, simply the overall effect of strategic
positioning. The exercising of these power relations resonate throughout the whole of society, they
are not localised in either the relationship between the state and its citizens or at the frontier of class
relations.
Power produces knowledge. In fact Foucault states quite baldly that one directly implies the
other. There can be no power relation without ‘the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor
any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’32. Foucault
wants us to examine these ‘power-knowledge relations’, but not in the tradition of thought that states
that knowledge can only exist where power relations are suspended, that knowledge can only develop
outside of its injunctions, demands, and interests. He wants the modalities of knowledge to be regarded
as ‘so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical
transformations’33. As Foucault himself states, ‘it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that
produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and
struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of
knowledge’34.
Discipline
The methods which made possible a meticulous control of the body, and by which it is subjected to
force, Foucault suggests might be called disciplines. He points out that different disciplinary methods
have long been in existence (for example, the monastery, the army, the workshop, etc.), what was
28 Ibid., p. 224.
29 Ibid., p. 26.
30 Ibid., p. 26.
31 Ibid., p. 26.
32 Ibid., p. 27.
33 Ibid., p. 28.
34 Ibid., p. 28.
148
different in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that discipline became a general formula
of domination. The elegance of the disciplinary mode lay in the fact that it could reduce the cost (and
violence) of relations like slavery, domestic service, or feudal vassalage, while achieving effects of
utility at least as great. It was different, too, from asceticism, whose function was to renounce rather
than increase utility and which was primarily aimed at an increased mastery of one’s own body.
The disciplines render the human body more obedient and hence more useful, the body finds itself
‘entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it’35. What was being
formed here was a policy of coercions, a ‘calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its
behaviour’36. What Foucault calls ‘[a] “political anatomy”, which was also a “mechanics of power”’37,
was being born. Discipline, in short, produces subjected and practised bodies, what he calls ‘docile’
bodies. This new political anatomy must not be thought of a sudden discovery, it was a multiplicity of
often minor processes that overlap, repeat, or imitate one another; the support they give one another
in their various domains of application converge to produce what Foucault calls ‘the blueprint of a
general method’38. What is interesting about all of this is that according to Foucault these disciplines
came into being in response to particular needs; he cites industrial innovation, a renewed outbreak
disease, or the invention of the rifle as examples. And as we saw in Part II, these are exactly the sorts of
contingent beginnings that enabled the West to colonise much of the rest of the world.
‘The “Enlightenment”, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.’39
Foucault states that here there can be no question of writing the history of different disciplinary
institutions, he simply wants to map some of the essential techniques that spread most easily. These
were meticulous, often minute, techniques, but were important because they defined a certain mode
of detailed political investment of the body – what he refers to as a ‘new micro-physics’ of power. And
because they reached out to broader domains, they tended to cover the entire social body. Foucault
cites enclosures which confined the indigent, but the workshop also made use of enclosure (only in
a different way), the machinery works’ space is even more flexible, depending on the principle of
elementary location or partitioning, with each individual assigned their own place, and each place its
individual. Hospitals, especially military and naval ones, were functional sites which gradually coded
their space so that particular places could correspond not only to the need to supervise, or to break
dangerous communications, but also to create a useful space. The medical supervision of disease was
inseparable from a whole series of other controls, for example the military’s control over deserters,
or fiscal control over commodities, hence the need to distribute and partition off space in a rigorous
manner.
A port, especially a military one, was an even more complex version of this sort of space, with
its flows of goods and men (some of whom were willingly signed up, others who were there by force
– i.e. Shanghaied). Ports were crossroads for dangerous mixtures, what Foucault calls meeting places
for forbidden circulations40. This was even more so the case in colonial ports like Singapore, Hong
Kong, and Shanghai, and as has already been seen in Part II, the early nineteenth-century term for a
colonial port city like Singapore was actually a ‘factory’ (from ‘manufactory’). Like the factories that
appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, the principle of individualised partitioning became ever
more apparent. In Singapore we have seen the dividing practice of keeping the various races to their
own areas, something that is clearly in keeping with Foucault’s analysis of ‘distributing individuals
in a space in which one might isolate them and map them’41 for the industrial factory. So what seems
shockingly racist to us today in a plan like Singapore’s seems to obey a compelling logic that, according
35 Ibid., p. 138.
36 Ibid., p. 138.
37 Ibid., p. 138.
38 Ibid., p. 138.
39 Ibid., p. 222.
40 Ibid., p. 144.
41 Ibid., p. 144.
149
to Foucault, simply obtained at the time.
Michel Foucault also, interestingly, goes on to give the example of the ‘class’ in Jesuit colleges,
where groups of hundreds of pupils were divided into subgroups of ten, each with its respective
decurion. Opposing camps, Roman or Carthaginian, rivalled one another, with each pupil competing
directly against his opposite number in the opposing camp. This is also remarkably similar to the ‘house’
system to be found English public schools. What is interesting about this is the fact that the Jesuit cadet,
as well as the English public-schoolboy, should both have gone on to be such important characters in
empire-building. Both of these types seem to have made use of a startlingly similar system in their
educational formation. Public schools in England also instilled a sense of continuity to ancient Rome
and Greece in their curriculum, as has been pointed out in Part II, with the teaching of Latin and Greek,
making these languages the basis for colonial and civil service examinations. Foucault also reminds
us finally that what he calls ‘the Roman model’42 played a dual role at the time of the Enlightenment:
its republican aspect was the very embodiment of liberty, while its military aspect was the ideal schema
for discipline.
42 Ibid., p. 146.
150
4 THE ALLEYWAY HOUSE: A BENIGN PANOPTICON
Having seen this link to the colonies that Michel Foucault himself has suggested, but never had the time
(or perhaps the inclination) to develop, it might now be appropriate to turn our attention to the practical
application of a Foucauldian theory to an actual space: the Shanghai alleyway house. This structure
can be seen as a panopticon (small ‘p’ as an adjective, as opposed to the capital ‘P’ of the noun – or
the Benthamite prison). This is not the empty-hearted and somewhat sinister apparatus of control that
Foucault’s pessimistic (though accurate) reading of Jeremy Bentham’s prison plan has given us; rather it
is a benign apparatus, one that helps its society to function in a way that enables a rich and varied street
life to come into being – the sort of street life we saw highlighted in Part I. In the comparison that was
drawn between the Shanghai alleyway house and the Singapore shophouse we saw the former consisting
of a tree-structure, and the latter a network. Oddly, or perhaps not, these differing street structures have
resulted in very different social and use patterns. In Singapore we saw how the network structure has
enabled the shophouse to be effectively and dynamically reused, however it has never been able to
engender the sort of vibrant social life that was such a feature of Shanghai’s alleyway houses – the five-
foot-way (the zone where Singapore’s public and private melding took place) was far too small to allow
for this. It can be argued that Shanghai’s alleyway house tree-structure has enabled a social life that was
rich and vibrant, certainly when seen against the more pessimistic Foucauldian notion of the panoptic
society.
Michel Foucault tells us that ‘[s]tones can make people docile and knowable’1. The Panopticon
was an apparatus of control whose effectiveness depended on visibility, the visibility of those under
surveillance, which in turn depended on the central point from which they were watched (the word
‘surveyed’ might almost have been used here except that it does not quite capture the more active
characteristics of the verb ‘to watch’ and would in all probability have suggested too benign a heart for
such a sinisterly efficient apparatus). The point that needs to be made here, and which will need a brief
summary of Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon in order to make it, is that an urban structure like the
Shanghai alleyway house also depends on visibility for its social effectiveness, but not visibilities that
radiates from a central control, rather one where everyone can act as a surveyor, as well as be surveyed
(and here the more benign verb ‘to survey’ can actually usefully be employed). The alleyway house’s
tree-structure produced an observed hierarchy of streets, graduating from the public to the private, and
as such acted as a benign panopticon.
The Panopticon
Michel Foucault states that the success of disciplinarity comes from the use of simple instruments,
and he lists three of them: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgement, and their combination in
the third, the examination. Hierarchical observation is where the exercise of discipline presupposes a
mechanism that can coerce simply by means of observation. As Foucault tells us, ‘an apparatus in which
the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means
of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible’2.
Normalising judgement compares, differentiates, hierarchises, homogenises, and excludes;
it normalises all points and supervises every instant in disciplinary institutions. The power of what
Foucault calls ‘the Norm’ appears through discipline. He saw ‘the Normal’ as a principle of coercion
in teaching that emerged when standardised education was introduced in France (with what were
known, significantly, as the écoles normales). It reflected a national standardisation (particularly
in medicine) of what constituted general norms. Like surveillance, normalisation was one of the
3 Ibid., p. 184.
4 Ibid., p. 184.
5 Ibid., p. 172.
6 Ibid., p. 207.
7 Ibid., p. 202.
8 Ibid., p. 205.
9 Ibid., p. 205.
152
to judge them continuously, alter their behaviour, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and it
will even be possible to observe the director himself’10. The point was that in each of its applications the
perfection of the exercise of power was possible, and by reducing the number of those who exercised
it (and increasing the number of those on whom it was exercised) it could allow for intervention
at any moment. But of course intervention is never necessary, as Foucault ruefully points out, ‘[t]he
panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in material, in
personnel, in time); it assures its efficacy by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and
its automatic mechanisms’11.
Foucault sees the panoptic mechanism as not simply being a hinge, ‘a point of exchange between
a mechanism of power and a function’, he sees it as ‘a way of making power relations function in a
function, and of making a function function through these power relations’12. He saw that the panoptic
schema could be used whenever it was necessary to deal with a multiplicity of individuals on whom
a task or a particular form of behaviour had to be imposed. In fact, Foucault saw the panoptic schema
as destined to spread throughout the entire social body, and it would be able to do so without losing
any of its properties. As Foucault says, ‘[w]e are much less Greeks [sic] than we believe. We are neither
in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power,
which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism’13. Panopticism became, according
to Foucault, the ‘general principle of a new “political anatomy” whose object and end are not the
relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline’14. The panoptic arrangement provided for its own
generalisation because it could programme the basic functioning of society thanks to its elementary and
easily transferable mechanism. Disorder and agitation, disobedience and bad conduct, all of the things
that plagued society could now be banished by this simple and elegant mechanism. And it is these very
things which Ledoux had wanted to exclude from his architecturally perfect city, which, as Foucault
tellingly shows us, Ledoux called ‘offences of non-surveillance’15.
Of course the Panopticon never did manage to achieve a polyvalency, it was only ever built as
a prison, particularly from the 1830s onwards. There was, however, one alternative which ties in to
this thesis’s research into colonialism, and that was the transportation of criminals mentioned earlier.
Transportation, which Foucault calls the only alternative to prison, was abandoned in England 1867,
France, oddly enough, only took it up as a practice during the Second Empire (1852-1870). As a practice
it was ‘mysterious and gloomy’, and Foucault contrasts it to Bentham’s more salutary method for
dealing with criminals16. According to Foucault, the deportation of criminals was demanded by France’s
Chamber of Deputies or the General Councils on several occasions during the Second Empire; it was
seen as a way of potentially lightening the financial burden imposed by the detention of prisoners. Plans
were drawn up for the deportation of delinquents, undisciplined soldiers, prostitutes, and orphans to
colonise Algeria. In fact Algeria was prevented from thus becoming a penal colony only by a law of
1854 which resulted in French Guiana and New Caledonia taking over this unhappy function.
Foucault sees the panopticon as a very modern idea, but also one that is, conversely, completely
archaic since the panoptic mechanism places someone at its centre. This he likens to the taking over
of a sovereignty function, where none of the subjects can escape and none of their actions can be
unknown. Foucault developed this thinking in his later lectures at the Collège de France, where he states
that the central point of the panopticon can function as a perfect sovereign because it is not an idea
of a power that takes the form of an exhaustive surveillance of individuals constantly under the eyes
of this sovereign, rather it acts as a set of mechanisms that attach importance to specific phenomena
10 Ibid., p. 204.
11 Ibid., p. 206.
12 Ibid., pp. 206-207.
13 Ibid., p. 217.
14 Ibid., p. 208.
15 Claude Nicolas Ledoux quoted in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, p. 214.
16 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 264.
153
not to individual phenomena; even if individuals do sometimes appear, these are specific processes of
individualisation17. He sees the relation between the individual and the collective, between the totality of
the social body and its elementary fragments, as being made to function in a completely different way
(and this ties into the series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France where he examined the notion
of population, among others).
What is perhaps most interesting is the fact that Foucault seems to think the government of
populations is ‘…completely different from the exercise of sovereignty over the fine grain of individual
behaviours. It seems to me [Foucault] that we have two completely different systems of power’18. This
is correct, it is also the very analysis that led to an understanding of the usefulness of the panopticon in
this research’s attempts to understand what is happening in the Shanghai alleyway house. The visibility
that was possible in such a hierarchical arrangement of streets – where strangers, and residents, could
be monitored by one another – not only reflected the way in which Chinese society makes use of its
cities’ streets, but, in Shanghai’s specific case, with the British (or at least Western) ethos of its foreign
concessions, this was further mitigated in these pockets of the more traditional Chinese way of life.
In fact, it could even be argued that these finely grained alleyways managed to engender their unique
street life because of their opposition to, or contrast with, the rest of the Western-style city, with its
overarching Western footprint. Thus they can be seen as being similar to Beijing’s hutongs, yet subtler;
and, as in the case of Singapore, have more scope for this subtlety for the simple reason that they have
more space in which to operate.
This is why it is possible to reject the Foucauldian pessimism of the carceral archipelago,
at least for the Shanghai alleyway house – and note that the alleyway house accounted for the vast
majority of the built-up area of the city during the colonial, as aerial photographs of the city will testify.
The panoptic function engenders the alleyway house with a rich and vibrant street life, reflecting the
incredible fecundity of this unique colonial-era commingling of East and West. And it is this that
we need to see in any reading of Shanghai today – this function of social visibility via the benign
panopticon of the alleyway house – because it is this that has given the city streets their incredible
richness and vibrancy. And it is this that we should be seeking to recapture when attempting to learn
from the past, not simply redecorating empty alleyway houses so that international coffee-shop chains
can have a prettier premises in which to do business.
17 Michel Foucault, ‘Lecture Number Three’ (25 January 1978), from Security, Territory, Population:
Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., pp. 55-86.
18 Ibid., p. 66.
154
seems lost on a world where ever more carefully graded categories show the homosexual as referring
exclusively to males, lesbianism to females, and the emergence of even more subtle distinctions such as
bi-sexual, transgender, etc. Of course there is, or should be, a distinction between sexuality and the act
of coitus itself.
Foucault rapidly moves beyond sexuality per se to develop a notion which he calls ‘bio-
power’, which concerns itself with the task of administering life. This it does on two levels: one, the
anatomo-politics of the human body, and two, the social group. Foucault also studied the notion of
‘governmentality’ in The History of Sexuality, which he saw as developing from medieval pastoral care,
a time when a ruler had acted as a sort of shepherd to the ‘flock’ under his or her care.
Foucault saw the emergence of the notion of ‘population’ (as an economic and political problem)
in the eighteenth century. This was one of the great innovations in the techniques of power. Population
was ‘everything that extends from biological rootedness through the species up to the surface that
gives one a hold provided by the public’19. Population was balanced between its own growth and the
resources it commanded. Population was wealth and/or manpower. Governments realised that they
were not simply dealing with subjects but with a ‘population’, one with specific phenomena, for
example the variables of birth and death rates, life expectancy, health, and habitation20. The public was
a population ‘seen under the aspect of its opinions, ways of doing things, forms of behaviour, customs,
fears, prejudices, and requirements; it is what one gets a hold on through education, campaigns, and
convictions’21. Here was a whole new field of realities that were pertinent elements for the mechanisms
of power, the ‘pertinent space within which and regarding which one must act’22.
The transformation of sex into a discourse was sublimated into this new understanding. It was
not a case that there was a discourse of power with another one running counter to it. Foucault saw
discourses as being practical elements or blocks that operated within a field of relations, with the result
that different, even contradictory, discourses could exist side by side. The ‘question’ of sex would be
a good example of this. Foucault saw sex as being both an interrogation and a problematisation (with
its need for confession, as well as its integration into a field of rationality), in his words, ‘we demand
that sex speak the truth (but, since it is the secret and is oblivious to its own nature, we reserve for
ourselves the function of telling the truth of its truth, revealed and deciphered at last), and we demand
that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we
possess in our immediate consciousness’23.
This in turn ties into Foucault’s notion of power as being able to mask a substantial part of itself
because it is power’s ability to hide its own mechanisms that makes it tolerable. Power is omnipresent
because it can be produced from one moment to the next. Power is everywhere not because it embraces
everything but because it comes from everywhere; it is simply an overall effect. Power is not an
institution, neither is it a structure; power is the name we attribute to a complex series of strategies
that operate in any given society. Power is not something that can be seized, or shared, because it is
exercised from innumerable points, and in an interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations. Yet
where there is power, there is resistance, and yet this resistance is never in a position of exteriority
in its relation to power. Foucault’s notion of ‘bio-power’ as being an indispensable element in the
development of capitalism is further confirmed by his saying that it would not have been possible ‘…
without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the
phenomena of population to economic processes’24.
The History of Sexuality, Volume II, The Use of Pleasure continues this analysis of the
19 Ibid., p. 75.
20 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, p. 25.
21 Michel Foucault, Lecture Number Three (25 January 1978), from Security, Territory, Population:
Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., p. 75.
22 Ibid., p. 75.
23 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, p. 69.
24 Ibid., p. 141.
155
problematisation of sex which Foucault saw as not being so much directly related to the institution
of marriage but with ‘the direct, symmetrical, and reciprocal obligation that might derive from it’25.
He goes on to note in The History of Sexuality, Volume III, The Care of the Self that ‘[a]nyone who
exercises power has to place himself in a field of complex relations where he occupies a transition
point’26, and he quotes Epictetus as saying ‘[b]eating an ass is not governing men’27. One link to the
colonial world which might be fruitful to highlight here is Foucault’s maintaining that the Roman
administration had needed what he called a ‘managerial aristocracy’, (quoting R. Syme); an aristocratic
service that would furnish the ‘different kinds of agents necessary to “administer the world”’28. In much
the same way as the British colonial apparatus made use of a managerial class of people drawn from the
higher echelons of society to administer its empire (the Oxford and Cambridge elite we saw highlighted
by Manuel Castells in Part I). China, too, had long made use of a scholar gentry in a similar way in
order to administer its own huge empire.
25 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, p. 150.
26 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume III: The Care of the Self, p. 88.
27 Ibid., p. 91.
28 Ibid., p. 84.
29 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, p. 31.
30 Michel Foucault, Lecture Number Seven (22 February 1978), from Security, Territory, Population:
Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., p. 183.
31 Ibid., pp. 184-185.
32 Ibid., p. 184.
156
university work to his students Foucault thought that studying Bacon would not be a waste of time33. As
Michel Senellart has pointed out in his copious footnotes, maybe this advice has been heeded, according
to Senellart the study of Francis Bacon has ‘enjoyed an important expansion in France since the end
of the 1970s, with the translation of the Essais (Aubier, 1979), La Nouvelle Atlantide (Payot, 1983;
GF, 1995), Novum Organum (PUF, 1986), De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum/Du progres et de la
promotion des savoirs (Gallimard, “Tel,” 1991), and La Sagesse des Anciens (Vrin, 1997)’34.
It is in Michel Foucault’s exploration of what constitutes a town that we find the most elegant
analysis in these lectures. Foucault cogently highlights the fact that the basic problem of a town is
circulation. While this is prescient, it leads him further to state that the most important point of a town
was that it could not, or should not, ‘be conceived or planned according to a static perception that
would ensure the perfection of the function there and then, but will open onto a future that is not exactly
controllable, not precisely measured or measurable, and a good town plan takes into account precisely
what might happen’35. This ties in beautifully to what we have been looking at in the work of Jane
Jacobs, Richard Sennett, Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijendorp, Charles Jencks, et al., and is something
that Modernist architects and urban planners were only beginning to dimly perceive for themselves at
that time.
[P]ower of a pastoral type, which over centuries – for more than a millennium – had been
linked to a defined religious institution, suddenly spread out into the whole social body; it
found support in a multitude of institutions. And, instead of a pastoral power and a political
power, more or less linked to each other, more or less rival, there was an individualizing ‘tactic’
which characterized a series of powers; those of the family, medicine, psychiatry, education, and
employers36.
It is in this essay that Foucault also states that the goal of his work for twenty years had not
been to analyse the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis, but ‘to
create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’37.
It is not power, but the subject that is the general theme of Foucault’s research. Foucault here defines
a relationship of power as ‘a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others.
Instead it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which
may arise in the present or the future’38; and he goes on to neatly define the act of governing as ‘to
structure the possible field of action of others’39. These definitions have become so well known that their
brilliance, and their elegance, is sometimes almost overlooked. The ability to express such profundity
33 Michel Foucault, Lecture Number Ten (15 March 1978), from Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., pp. 255-283.
34 Ibid., p. 282, endnote 39.
35 Michel Foucault, Lecture Number One (11 January 1978), from Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., p. 20.
36 Michel Foucault, ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’, from Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, p. 215.
37 Ibid., p. 208.
38 Ibid., p. 220.
39 Ibid., p. 221.
157
with such concision can only result from having spent many years in hard work, broad study, and deep
thought. The resultant wisdom should then be used carefully, and appropriately by others who study
Foucault’s work, not bolted hastily onto some commentary in order to try and reinforce an otherwise
undeveloped argument.
One of the reasons Foucault is so popular with architects is, as we saw earlier, the fact that
he spent much of his work analysing actual spaces. Foucault thought that ‘[s]pace is fundamental
in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power’40. Architects tend to
analyse particular buildings, institutions such as hospitals or schools, and this they do in terms of their
disciplinary functions, tending to focus on the walls; Foucault’s concern is more with the spaces
that these walls create. Foucault tries to see architecture as an element of support, a way of ensuring
‘…a certain allocation of people in space, a canalization of their circulation, as well as the coding of
their reciprocal relations. So it is not only considered as an element in space, but is especially thought of
as a plunge into a field of social relations in which it brings about some specific effects’41. This is what
has been attempted in the analysis of the alleyway houses of colonial Shanghai contained in this thesis.
Foucault was surprised that the problem of space took so long to emerge as an historico-political
problem. He sees it as an economico-political issue which needs to be studied in detail. He also saw
the practice of architecture at the end of the eighteenth century as becoming involved in problems of
population, health, and what he calls the urban question, as he states:
Previously, the art of building corresponded to the need to make power, divinity and might
manifest. The palace and the church were the great architectural forms, along with the
stronghold. Architecture manifested might, the Sovereign, God. Its development was for long
centred on these requirements. Then, late in the eighteenth century, new problems emerge: it
becomes a question of using the disposition of space for economico-political ends.42
A whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history
of powers (both these terms in the plural) – from the great strategies of geo-politics to the little
tactics of the habitat, institutional architecture from the classroom to the design of hospitals,
passing via economic and political installations43.
As is so often the case in the history of techniques, it can take years or even centuries to
implement them. What is certain, from Foucault’s analysis, is the fact that this new technique of
architecture has had a formative influence on human relations. The exploration of the Shanghai alleyway
house that is contained in this thesis represents an attempt to write the history of this fertile hybrid of
East and West, not just to analyse its pretty architectural articulation, nor simply to elucidate some
background information about which of them were used as the backdrop for a given novel or short
story or film, what has been attempted is an effort to engage in an archaeological analysis, the better
to see what had gone before, and in a genealogical one, the better to understand the typology’s origins
and descent to the present day. But most of all the aim was to try and trace the living links that are
still be found there, in the social and familial organisations, and in the rich and vibrant street life of
Shanghai. In other words, an effort to trace the consanguinities, the living links that circulate through
these alleyway houses and link them to the still faintly beating heart of the old city; an analysis elegantly
adumbrated in Foucault’s Collège de France lectures by his characterisation of the basic problem
40 ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’, from The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow, ed., p. 252.
41 Ibid., p. 253.
42 ‘The Eye of Power’, from Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, Colin
Gordon, ed., p. 148.
43 Ibid., p. 149.
158
of a town being circulation and the attendant analysis of town planning as needing to allow for the
contingent and the unexpected.
This is also why Foucault’s pessimistic notion of a carceral archipelago has been rejected here,
the Shanghai alleyway house’s panoptic function engenders a rich and vibrant street life thanks to its
function of social visibility – what has been called here the benign panopticon – and it is this that has
resulted in such richness and vibrancy. It might be appropriate to end this chapter with the question
of whether, having seen what underpins this lively street life, it could be possible to implement these
lessons elsewhere? Perhaps even graft this old way of life onto the newer, and as yet, lifeless spaces that
are being built elsewhere in the city as it reconnects itself to the global network?
159
5 ORIENTALISM: ‘THE NECESSARY FURNITURE OF EMPIRE’1
This chapter deals with the work of people who have either commented on Michel Foucault’s work or
made use of his methodology in the field of oriental and postcolonial studies. Jana Sawicki says that
Foucauldian commentators ‘have certainly addressed the toolkit metaphor’2, while Stuart Elden feels
that Foucault himself thought that his work could provide ‘a set of conceptual tools, a toolbox for use by
others’, but he admits that ‘these tools have sometimes been used uncritically, without due attendance
to their theoretical underpinnings’3. Sara Mills also states that there have been some obvious problems
with this approach to Foucault’s theory, and she dismisses commentators who simply like to use the odd
illustrative quotation to justify an argument.
One of the most egregious examples of this sort of approach in recent decades has perhaps been
that of Edward W. Said, whose understanding of the notion of discourse, as elucidated in Orientalism
and Culture and Imperialism, has been refuted by the works of Orientalists such as Robert Irwin and Ibn
Warraq, among others. These latter authors’ works – Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing and Warraq’s Defend-
ing the West – shall be cited in detail later in the chapter, before moving onto the final chapter in Part III
which illustrates what is felt to be a more effective (and accurate) application of Foucault’s theory in an
Asian urban environment, David Graham Shane’s analysis of the now demolished Kowloon Walled City
in Hong Kong, which he refers to as a ‘heterotopia par excellence’ (but which is referred to in this thesis
as a ‘double heterotopia’).
‘A book’, according to Jorge Luis Borges, ‘is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis
of innumerable relationships’4, and as Sara Mills so reasonably points out, a book can be used for any-
thing. Mills warns against the practice of taking sentences out of context in order to support whatever
argument the reader wishes, she also sees the fashionable nature of Michel Foucault’s work as leading
to some people having used it in an uncritical way. She cites Edward W. Said’s work on postcolonial-
ism as such a one, pointing out that ‘the style of sweeping generalisation that Foucault often makes and
which his followers have copied has irritated many people’5. This is the reason such a close reading
(with such copious quotation) from Foucault’s oeuvre has been made in this thesis, with the focus being
on such a relatively narrow selection of texts in the analysis of Shanghai, particularly that of Discipline
and Punish. And yet, fashionable or not, Foucault’s work has been used with intelligence and discretion
by many, Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s work on Singapore, which has already been highlighted, would be a good
example.
Brenda S.A. Yeoh makes use of Foucauldian notions such as what she calls the ‘norms and
forms’ of what shapes a colonial city’s built environment, which serve as a reflection of colonial as-
pirations, but also can be used (consciously and unconsciously) as strategies of power to incorporate,
categorise, discipline, control, and reform the inhabitants of the city6. She sees the municipal ‘inspect-
ing gaze’ as shifted from an overseeing of daily practices in Singapore’s Asian population, which were
carried out in specific spaces such as the house, the street, or the market, to controlling ‘the dimensions,
arrangements, and legibility of particular spaces (such as the house, the building block, and, ultimately,
the city as a whole) in order to influence the practices of those who inhabited or used such spaces’7. An-
1 Lord Curzon’s description of Oriental studies as being ‘[p]art of the necessary furniture of Empire’,
quoted in Edward W. Said’s Orientalism, p. 214.
2 Jana Sawicki, ‘Queering Foucault and the Subject of Feminism’, The Cambridge Companion to
Foucault, Gary Gutting, ed, p. 380.
3 Stuart Elden, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History, p. 93.
4 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A Note on (towards) Bernard Shaw’, Labyrinths, p. 249.
5 Sara Mills, Michel Foucault, p. 122.
6 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi-
ronment, pp. 16-17.
7 Ibid., p. 146.
160
other instrument of control was the naming of a city’s spaces, the defining and assigning of ‘proper’ uses
to particular spaces, and the relegating of more traditional uses of urban space to the periphery in order
to accommodate the demands of urban expansion.
It is important to bear in mind that according to Brenda S.A. Yeoh the Foucauldian techniques
of disciplinary power exercised by the colonisers would ‘…not automatically preclude the exercise of
counter-strategies on the part of those who are subject to such powers’8, she states quite unequivocally
that ‘[p]ower was not the intrinsic property of any one group, but instead operated through an ensemble
of strategies, of tactics and techniques’9. Yeoh’s investigations have uncovered practices the Chinese
citizens of Singapore had brought with them from China, organisations such as clan and dialect asso-
ciations, trade guilds, temples dedicated to particular deities, and, of course, secret societies (known as
triads, we will see more about these secret societies in the last chapter of this thesis when examining
Zhang Yimou’s film Shanghai Triad).
It was through these institutions that Chinese groups had access to a wide range of services
which supported their lifestyle (Yeoh gives examples of medical care, job protection, education, enter-
tainment, etc.). Facilities which catered to their own needs without having recourse to the colonial host
society. And even when it came to resisting the colonial authorities, which, as we saw in Part II, the Chi-
nese (and others) did successfully in the Veranda Riots, Yeoh points out that passive non-compliance by
large numbers of Asians could become a power to be reckoned with in a colonial situation. More com-
mon than the more active or heroic forms of protest, and in the long run less costly in terms of effort and
sacrifice, and, invariably, more successful.
The ‘Other’
Catherine Belsey maintains that some people fear foreigners because they demonstrate that there
are other, alternative ways of being, and hence our own ways are not inevitable10. This ‘otherness’ is
one of the key components of postmodern thought, particularly in postcolonial studies. Jacques Derrida
argues that any culture is ‘colonial’, in the sense that it imposes itself by its power to name things and
to lay down rules, particularly of conduct. As Jacques Derrida tells us: no one inhabits a culture by
nature11. According to Christopher Butler, postmodern theorists do not give a particularly convincing
account of the nature of the self because human identity is essentially seen as a sort of construction – he
gives the example of Cindy Sherman’s photographic series called Untitled Film Stills from 1977-8012.
The term postmodernists prefer for an individual is the ‘subject’ rather than the ‘self’, Butler claims
this is because this word captures a notion of subjection, thereby hinting at unspecified powers that
are believed to dominate societies. He also sees this trend as being influenced by the work of Michel
Foucault who showed the ways in which discourses of power were used in a society to marginalise
subordinate groups.
Postmodernists were enthusiastic about the potentially liberating effects of ethical or political
doctrines, yet according to Christopher Butler they were ‘immensely dependent on the extraordinary
prestige of these new intellectual authorities, whose influence was not a little sustained by their
heavy reliance upon a neologizing jargon, which imparted a tremendous air of difficulty and profundity
to their deliberations and caused great difficulties to their translators’13. He quotes John Searle as saying,
‘Michel Foucault once characterised Derrida’s prose style to me as “obscurantisme terroriste”. The text
is written so obscurely that you can’t figure out exactly what the thesis is (hence “obscurantisme”) and
then when one criticises this, the author says, “Vouz m’avez mal compris; vouz etes idiot”, (hence
8 Ibid., p. 14.
9 Ibid., p. 125.
10 Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 63.
11 Jacques Derrida cited in Catherine Belsey’s Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 64.
12 Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, pp. 53-55.
13 Ibid., p. 8.
161
“terroriste”)’14.
We have touched on this issue earlier, and it might be useful to stress again here that this is why
Foucault’s own work, as it has been applied to Shanghai, has been laid out so clearly. It is important to
be as clear as possible, because if an idea is clear in a writer’s mind then he or she should then be able to
set it down on paper clearly enough for others to make sense of it. Of course some people may not have
such a clear conception of what it is they want to say, or indeed of what it is they think others are saying,
as a result they cannot possibly hope to ever state anything with clarity. Sometimes this lack of clarity is
mistaken for profundity, a particularly postmodern condition, however time has a way of clearing away
these clouds, and after the space of a few decades those books that genuinely have something to say will
still be read, while those that only impressed by some sort of academic sleight-of-hand will have their
so-called insights proved as false as a phrenologist’s.
Christopher Butler sees many of the academic proponents of postmodernist theory in
England and the United States as having concentrated on what he calls ‘the inward translation of
Continental thought’15, which led to a number of interestingly transplanted cultural ideas, and a sharp
break with tradition. According to Butler this has led to a tension between postmodernism that derived
from the French intellectual scene and the mainstream of Anglo-American liberal philosophical
thought. He even goes so far as to suggest that ‘the often obscure, not to say obfuscating, modes of
speech and writing of these intellectuals were sometimes even intended to signify a defiance of that
“Cartesian” clarity of exposition which they said arose from a suspect reliance upon “bourgeois”
certainties concerning the world order’16. Perhaps this is why Edward W. Said’s work has provoked such
strong reactions in the Anglo-American academic world.
14 John Searle in the New York Review of Books (27 October 1983), quoted in Christopher Butler’s
Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 9.
15 Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, p. 8.
16 Ibid., p. 9.
162
whereas in the United States it would mean a Chinese or a Japanese; this has led to commentators on the
BBC having to clarify the term as specifically denoting a South-Asian if they are reporting a news item
from London or the British Midlands to an international audience.
There is a sort of subtle magic in the word ‘Orient’. We immediately begin to picture rich ori-
ental rugs, or think of Edmund Burke’s ‘voluptuaries of the Orient’, or Shakespeare’s ‘the beds in the
east are soft’. Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express conjures up images redolent of luxury,
romance, and intrigue, yet at its most basic, the word simply means the East. It is where we get the verb
‘to orient’, which comes from the Christian practice of building churches facing east – and not just the
churches, the graves of the faithful departed were also thus oriented so that when Judgement Day came
the dead could walk again in the risen Lord secure in the knowledge that they would at least be facing
the right way. (Priests were buried facing the opposite direction so they would be better able to instruct
their flock after all the waiting.)
Homi K. Bhabha puts his finger on one of the main difficulties with Orientalism when he says
that ‘…one can see the mirror image (albeit reversed in content and intention) of that ahistorical nine-
teenth-century polarity of Orient and Occident which, in the name of progress, unleashed the exclusion-
ary imperialist ideologies of self and other’17. He sees the transmutations and translations of indigenous
traditions as demonstrating their opposition to colonial authority and how ‘the desire of the signifier,
the indeterminacy of intertextuality, can be deeply engaged in the postcolonial struggle against domi-
nant relations of power and knowledge’18. Colonialism as a discourse of domination is one of the key
notions introduced by Edward W. Said in his book Orientalism, a notion, which, according to Robert
J.C. Young, is simultaneously enabling yet theoretically problematic, in that it moved the analysis of
colonialism, imperialism, and the struggles against them, into the arena of discourse. Said, according to
Young, took from Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge the idea that a discourse was an episte-
mological device which constructed ‘its objects of knowledge through the establishment of a practice of
a certain linguistic register’, he then goes on to state that ‘[r]ather than simply describing the world as it
is, as if language mediates reality directly, a discourse constructs the objects of reality and the ways in
which they are perceived and understood’19. Or as Said put it, ‘such texts can create not only knowledge
but also the very reality that they appear to describe’20.
Many of the problems that have generated such intense critical response to Said’s text have
been identified by Young as being the direct result of the way in which Said formulates his idea of a
discourse. The problem, as Young sees it, is that Said’s own discourse was ‘so inclusive as to make no
distinction between colonialism and imperialism, or the different forms that they took, or, within the
theoretical model elaborated, to make an opening for the impact of anti-colonial resistance’21 (something
that this thesis has been at pains to clarify, as we have seen in Part II).
Yet Said’s text remains of key importance precisely because he did manage to provide a general
theory, demonstrating that habitual practices, as well as different effects colonialism had on the colo-
nised territories (and their peoples), could actually be analysed conceptually and discursively. It was
this, according to Young, which ‘…created the academic field of postcolonialism and enabled such a
range of subsequent theoretical and historical work’22. Although what he calls the ‘genealogy of post-
colonial theory’ is, according to Young, ‘historically complex and wide-ranging, it could be seen as an
example of the sort of transcultural admixture that it so often analyses’23.
Said claims that Orientalism was ‘a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the
Orient’, but which amounted to no more than a fantasy world created by the West, a projection onto the
A note on decolonisation
As some further background to Edward W. Said’s work it might be useful to briefly return to colonial
history, particularly as so much of what happened to the world as the great empires disintegrated
underpins Said’s investigations. World War I, as we have seen, ended the century of peace that followed
the 1815 Congress of Vienna and which had allowed the more or less cooperative imperialism of the
five great powers (Britain, France, Russia, Prussia (after 1871, Germany), and Austria-Hungary).
(And for any discussion of Asian colonialism it is probably safe to include the United States and Japan
on this list.) The War also scuppered the global economy by closing off trade routes and increasing
protectionism. The War’s forced mobilisation of colonial resources, including manpower, was resented
because, according to John Darwin, it was seen as having broken the bargain of colonial politics, but
perhaps most importantly, it ruined the myth of Europe as being a uniquely progressive culture.
One of the immediate effects of the War was the dismembering of the empires who had lost it:
30.
36 Ibid., p. 32.
166
Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman. Russia had not lost as such, but she had certainly bowed
out early, losing territory to the Axis powers as a result, though later reconsolidating her position during
the Soviet Era and managing to hold her empire together until the 1990s. One of the side effects of
this dismemberment was that for the first time ever the Western powers had access to lands that had
previously been under the Ottomans. One unforeseen development of this, and one that was to have
such massive ramifications for the rest of the world in the twentieth century, was the establishment of
the oil industry.
The colonies of these three former empires became League of Nations Mandates, and as such
were open to inspection by League officials, they were also, in theory, open to the commerce of all.
However, they were in effect British and French colonies. The League was generally regarded as a paper
tiger, and its subsequent failure to prevent the conquest of Abyssinia by Italy (itself a League member)
showed this all too clearly. Yet there was actually little enthusiasm for an Arab empire in either Britain
or France, especially if it was going to cost money. John Darwin sees the partition of the Middle East
as the high tide of empire, and as he neatly points out, it was the tide that turned soonest37. It is one of
history’s more recent ironies that the area that was to become of such geopolitical significance after
World War II (with the industrialised economies’ increasing dependence on oil) was, in the aftermath of
World War I, seen as nothing more than desert, a place that was going to cost the imperial powers too
much money to make it worthwhile keeping. In 1920 the Middle East produced only about one per cent
of the world’s oil, and by 1939 this had hardly risen, accounting for some five per cent (with most of
this coming from south-west Iran). Oil however, rapidly turned into one of the world’s great geopolitical
targets for both diplomacy and warfare by about the middle of the century. One of the first examples of
its strategic importance was Japan’s decision to invade the Dutch East Indies in 1941 to get their hands
on its vast oil reserves.
The waves of decolonization that followed World War II may have broken up the rest of the
world’s empires (with the exception of the United States, the Soviet Union, and China), but John
Darwin cautions us against thinking that this brought an end to colonial rule. Darwin sees the demolition
of a European-based order, one that had been based on extra-territorial rights, as being built on a cultural
hierarchy where the so-called superiority of North-West European (and American) societies were
contrasted with the non-Western cultures over which they held sway. Yet ironically, in some parts of the
decolonised world (particularly East Asia), the West’s influence has continued to be asserted. Darwin
sees this as the creation of an American system which is imperial in all but name. Something, as we
have seen, David Harvey would agree with.
Real or imaginary fears about communism and Soviet expansion fuelled the United States’s
readiness to assume a leadership role on the world stage, especially once the other imperial players
had left it. The huge zone for which the United States provided strategic protection overlapped
neatly with the new international economy of which America was the pivot; together they formed
the Pax Americana. In the place of the old imperial territories, the new superpowers of America and
Russia engaged in a Cold War, a protracted struggle for global hegemony where informal networks
of clients and allies were held together by arms supplies, military missions, developmental aid,
and (particularly in America’s case) commercial activity. As John Darwin says, ‘[d]ecolonization’s
unexpected course seemed to have set the scene for new kinds of empire’38.
48 Ibid., p. 169.
49 Ibid., p. 8.
50 Ibid., p. 8.
51 Ibid., p. 218.
52 Ibid., p. 227.
53 Ibid., p. 156.
54 Lord Cromer, quoted in Edward W. Said’s Orientalism, p. 212.
55 W. Somerset Maugham, ‘The Door of Opportunity’, Collected Short Stories Volume 2, p. 524.
169
Being a White Man, in short, was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold
of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible’56. While this is fundamentally sound,
there are some problems with Said’s analysis, which we will see in a moment (particularly with the
criticism of it by Robert Irwin, Ibn Warraq, et al.), where it is pointed out that the geopolitical climate at
the time of Said’s writing of Orientalism would not only have affected him, but that the 1973 invasion
of Palestine by Israel seems to have formed the impetus for the book in the first place.
Orientalism is a polemic, it even goes so far as to contain the statement that ‘…every
European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost
totally ethnocentric’57. This is outrageous, and is something that will also be returned to shortly when
citing Irwin and Warraq’s work, in the meantime the thought of a scholar of Said’s reputation claiming
the assumption ‘that Islam’s only worthwhile relations have been with the West’58 is not only shockingly
naïve but simply false. First of all Said’s work seems to assume, or at least infer, an Arabic Islam, which
simply ignores the rest of the Islamic world, particularly that of Asia. (We have already seen the strange
silence the hovers over that vast region of the globe encompassing Malaysia and Indonesia, not to men-
tion China’s vast Muslim population.) Secondly, it completely ignores centuries of maritime trade across
the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the land-based Silk Route. For someone who claims that geography
is ‘the handmaid of history’59 and ‘was essentially the material underpinning for knowledge about
the Orient’60 is it not strange that his own knowledge of it should seem to be so selective? One other
important point is Said’s contention that ‘…for something more than the first half of the nineteenth
century Paris was the capital of the Orientalist world (and, according to Walter Benjamin, of the
nineteenth century)’61, this statement (Benjamin notwithstanding) completely and unaccountably ignores
German-speaking Orientalism, which, as we shall see, was actually far more important than the French.
Edward W. Said is right, however, when he states that ‘[o]ne aspect of the electronic, postmodern
world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed’62. And
not just the Orient. Said maintains that ‘[t]elevision, the films, and all the media’s resources have forced
information into more and more standardized moulds.’63 This could perhaps be best exemplified by
the CNN ‘soundbyte’, where every answer is prefaced with an interviewer’s admonition to ‘be brief’.
In a world of constantly breaking news, who has the luxury of lavishing time on in-depth analysis?
But this is exactly what Saskia Sassen’s global elite are being paid for. As we saw in Part I, these
people take the time to analyse data so that they can give us their informed judgements. Said’s point
that ‘[s]o far as the Orient is concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified the
hold of the nineteenth-century academic and imaginative demonology of “the mysterious Orient”’64,
may not be untrue, but he spoils it rather by stating elsewhere that ‘[t]o say simply that Orientalism
was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in
advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact’65. And it is here that we come to one of his most
contentious points: that the study of Orientalism was simply, to use Said’s word again, the ‘handmaid’
of imperialism. That is, it was founded on racist assumptions of Western superiority, and while those
in the West cannot deny that many of the attitudes that helped them to build up their vast empires were
indeed race-based, to have to take seriously a comment like ‘…every European, in what he could say
66 Ibid., p. 204.
67 Ibid., p. 93.
68 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A Note on (towards) Bernard Shaw’, Labyrinths, p. 249.
69 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 41.
70 Ibid., p. 41.
71 Ibid., p. 41.
72 Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, p. 281.
73 Ibid., p. 281.
74 Ibid., p. 281.
75 Ibid., p. 4.
76 Ibid., p. 4.
77 Ibid., pp. 281-282.
171
responsible for recent Middle-East disasters. Ibn Warraq would concur, he maintains that ‘[o]ne of
Said’s major theses is that Orientalism was not a disinterested, scholarly activity but a political one, with
Orientalists preparing the ground for and colluding with imperialists’78.
Scholars who were not Orientalists delighted in Edward W. Said’s book, seeing it as a way to
‘negotiate the other’ or ‘reinvent alterity’, and other equally delightful postmodern pursuits. Said was
hailed as a leading light in postcolonial studies, and associated with figures as influential as Homi
K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. We have already had occasion to see examples of Bhabha’s singular
prose style, Spivak’s is even more idiosyncratic (Irwin even goes so far as to mischievously quote one
particularly recondite passage in Spivak, which hardly covers either author with glory). While these
are not writers anyone would use to exemplify a lucid prose style (important and all as their work may
have been), Said is being done a disservice by being placed alongside them by Irwin. Despite his many
failings, and the unsustainability of some of his conclusions, Said’s writing style is nothing less than a
model of elegance and concision, as might be expected from such a respected literary critic.
Robert Irwin sees Said’s portrayal of Orientalism as ‘a canon of great but wicked books,
almost all by dead white males’79, as the error of someone who ‘overvalued the contestatory role
of the intellectual, [and] seems to have held the view that the political problems of the Middle East
were ultimately textual ones that could be solved by critical reading skills’80. Said saw discourse and
textual strategies as the engines that ‘drove the imperial project and set up the rubber plantations,
dug out the Suez Canal and established garrisons of legionnaires in the Sahara’, this was the error of
‘a literary critic who wildly overvalued the importance of high literature in intellectual history’81. Said’s
Orientalism was, according to Irwin, a discourse on the hegemony of (Western) imperialism, where
everything that could be written and thought about the Orient (and more particularly about Islam and the
Arabs) legitimised the Western penetration of Arab lands. Its discursive formation was not restricted to
scholars, but included imperialist administrators, explorers, and novelists. The West enjoyed a monopoly
over how the Orient was to be represented, and these representations invariably carried implications of
Western superiority. As Irwin says, ‘[s]ince Orientalism is by its nature a Western sickness, the same
must be true of imperialism’82, it thus ignored non-Western imperial histories (Persians in Turkey and
Greece, and later India; the Ottomans in the Near and Middle East and North Africa; the Japanese, etc.).
Orientalism and the later Culture and Imperialism saw Said present himself as being on the front line
in a struggle against postcolonial Western hegemony. What Irwin most laments is the malign influence
these books have had, particularly since they have been ‘surprisingly effective in discrediting and
demoralizing an entire tradition of scholarship’83.
Edward W. Said published Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography in 1966. Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, a classic tale from the dark side of colonialism, may well have sparked off Said’s
interest in the evils of imperialism. Said’s next book, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), was
seen by Robert Irwin as being strongly influenced by Vico and Foucault, especially the notion that a
literary work is influenced by a discursive formation rather than by any given author. The early reviews
of Orientalism were mostly hostile, even by those whom Said had praised in the work (for example,
Hourani, Watt, Berque, and Rodinson), yet the book began to acquire a cult status, particularly, as
we have just seen, among those who were not actually Orientalists. Irwin saw what he calls ‘Said’s
fashionable brandishing of Gramsci and Foucault’ as having attracted some students84, mea culpa, but
like Irwin and Warraq, this researcher has found much to fault with Said’s work.
Edward W. Said cites Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon as stressing ‘the unavoidable
[…T]he groundwork for what is in effect now a fully global world. Electronic communications,
the global extent of trade, of availability of resources, of travel, of information about weather
patterns and ecological change have joined together even the most distant corners of the world.
This set of patterns, I believe, was first established and made possible by the modern empires.98
Said also saw the British, French, and American imperial experience as having a coherence and cultural
centrality in which narrative played a large part, and therefore finds it unsurprising that France and
England have such unparalleled traditions of novel-writing, with America following in their wake
in the twentieth century 99. According to Said, ‘…the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of
having an empire’, something he sees Conrad as having realised100. Preparations are made for it within
a culture rendering in its turn a kind of coherence for it, or, as W. Somerset Maugham so succinctly
put it: ‘Rudyard Kipling is generally supposed to have rendered the British people conscious of their
Empire’101. Said sees Conrad as being:
[…] considered along with Kipling, his slightly younger peer, to have rendered the experience
of empire as the main subject of his work with such force; and even though the two artists are
remarkably different in tone and style, they brought to a basically insular and provincial British
audience the color, glamor, and romance of the British overseas enterprise, which was well-
93 Ibid., p. 290.
94 Ibn Warraq, Defending the West, p. 43.
95 Ibid., pp. 61-62.
96 Edmund Leach cited in Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West, p. 245.
97 Ibn Warraq, Defending the West, p. 245.
98 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 6.
99 Ibid., pp. xxii-xxiii.
100 Ibid., p. 11 (italics in original).
101 W. Somerset Maugham, ‘The Short Story’, Points of View, p. 143.
174
known to specialized sectors of the home society.102
W. Somerset Maugham was their natural successor (even if not quite so talented, it has to be said).
Somerset Maugham wisely, having seen Kipling’s so expert handling of India (and Conrad’s Africa),
turned his not inconsiderable talents to British Malaya, a suitably virgin territory in which to work.
Edward W. Said believes a cultural form like the novel was immensely important in the
formation of imperial attitudes, and references, and experiences, particularly in the Western empires of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He does not mean that only the novel was important, he simply
considers it an aesthetic vehicle whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France made
it an interesting one to study. If commentators on Said’s work would only bear this in mind they might
not get so enraged by what they think he is saying. Yes, Said may have misused Foucault’s theories, but
as a literary theorist he did have some interesting things to say.
Said’s disquisition on Ireland’s colonial history will not be gone into here because David
Fitzpatrick’s article ‘Ireland and the Empire’ answers many of the more troublesome questions it raises.
As Ibn Warraq has pointed out: ‘the political expression of Irish attitudes towards Empire was far more
various and discordant than this [i.e. Said’s view] allows’103. Said’s coupling of Ireland and Australia
as ‘white colonies’ is less than convincing however. In the former there was an indigenous ‘white’
population, while in the latter, a native or aboriginal one – the colonising population of which happened
to be formed of a considerable number from the former (who were often sent as convicts). The point is
that they are both too different to effect any useful comparison, despite some interesting but ultimately
irrelevant historical links.
Said’s claim that ‘[m]ost historians of empire speak of the “age of empire” as formally beginning
around 1878, with “the scramble for Africa”’104 is not wholly inaccurate. He has already himself
highlighted 1870 as being the beginning of the period of colonial expansion into the Orient, and this
research has also pointed to Britain’s turn to imperialism at around 1871. Said, however, is wholly
wrong in his contention that the ‘scramble for Africa’ happened around 1878: as we saw in Part II it
began (and ended) in the 1880s. Finally, Said’s contention that empire was simply a matter of land
(including ways of ‘how it is to be surveyed and measured’105) is simply wrong. The statement that ‘[t]he
actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about’106 is simply too
naïve. Empire, as we have already seen, was always about more than just one factor taken in isolation;
yes, there was an increase in the number of annexations of territory, particularly between 1871 and
1914, but this, as we have seen, was often actuated by a fear of allowing another power to grab the land.
If we were to take one overarching factor, particularly in the empires that Edward W. Said is examining,
then the control of trade routes must outweigh the importance of the mere possession of any tract of
land, no matter how large.
108 Ibid., p. 5.
109 Ibid., p. 6.
110 Ibid., p. 6.
111 Ibid., p. 309.
112 Ibn Warraq, Defending the West, p. 19.
113 Ibid., p. 21.
114 Ibid., p. 24.
115 Ibid., pp. 23-24.
116 Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, p. 307.
176
references to Sir Thomas’s Antigua plantation in Mansfield Park there is only one single explicit refer-
ence to the slave trade. It is hard to see from this how Jane Austen could possibly have been seen as con-
doning slavery as a practice. Gabrielle White in particular thinks that Said’s misreading may be due to
the fact that he was ‘insensitive to the satire present in Austen’, as Warraq so gleefully points out: ‘Said
was not known for his sense of humor’117.
One of Ibn Warraq’s most glaring inaccuracies occurs, however, in the section where he is at-
tacking the so-called ‘continental charlatans’. Warraq suggests that one of the ‘distinguishing character-
istics of the West’ is the separation of spiritual and temporal authority, which he sees as deriving from
‘one or more of the three golden threads [i.e. rationalism, universalism, and self-criticism]’118. This is a
lovely idea, unfortunately there never was a separation of spiritual and temporal authority in the West,
at least not in the way that Warraq would have us believe. France did separate its church and state back
in 1907, but to take two of the three powers so often cited in Said’s Orientalism (the United States and
the United Kingdom), neither a country that puts ‘In God we trust’ on its banknotes (as does the former),
nor one that has an hereditary head of state as it head of church (as is the case in the latter), could be
said to have a very clear separation of church and state.
Yet Warraq seems convinced that there has been a separation of church and state in the West, one
that is based on ’[t]he political principle embodied in the apothegm “reason not revelation”’119. Perhaps a
reading of recent history might lead some to think that religion plays a less than central role in people’s
lives, at least in Europe (where it is not generally the practice in government to begin cabinet meetings
with a prayer – as is the case with the second President Bush’s administration), but Warraq dates this so-
called separation as having happened shortly after the death of Christ, basing his assumption on a mis-
reading of St Matthew (from which he quotes: ‘“Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s;
and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21)’120). Queen Elizabeth II of England still holds
the title ‘Defender of the Faith’, admittedly she is supposed to be defending the Holy Roman Catholic
and Apostolic Faith, a title granted to King Henry VIII in 1521 for his stance against the troublesome
canker Protestantism (to which, of course, he later succumbed). The King of Spain used to be styled
‘His Most Catholic Majesty’, while the Kings of France were known as ‘The Most Christian Kings’. In
1685 France revoked the religious tolerance granted to Protestants under the Edict of Nantes; Spain’s
fifteenth-century Inquisition was a notorious bloodbath based on the strictest religious intolerance; and
even the United Kingdom was riven by religious strife until the Glorious Revolution of 1688 with the
deposition of the legal (but Roman Catholic) King James II (who was replaced by his Protestant daugh-
ter Queen Mary, who reigned with her Dutch husband King William III (the Prince of Orange)). The
United Kingdom only allowed Catholic Emancipation to occur as late as 1829, and to this day any mem-
ber of its reigning house who marries a Roman Catholic must first renounce their claim to the throne.
So, far from enjoying a separation of church and state, the West has had a list of state-sponsored reli-
gious intolerance that is long and shameful.
Ibn Warraq is of course right to applaud ‘the freedom of thought, intellectual curiosity, rational-
ity, and leaps of imagination that produced the theories of Kepler and Tycho Brahe, Copernicus and Gal-
ileo, Newton and Einstein, Darwin and Crick, produced the works of Chaucer and Dante, Shakespeare
and Racine, Goethe and Samuel Johnson; the paintings of Giotto and Cimabue, Raphael and Michelan-
gelo; the architecture of Alberti and Palladio, Wren and Hawksmoor; the music of Bach and Palestrina,
Haydn and Mozart, Wagner and Verdi’121: also a long list, though what the members of it have in com-
mon with one another is very far from clear. We must not forget that quite a number of these individuals
only achieved their immortality in spite of religious intolerance, rather than in some idealised world of
free expression.
122 Michel Foucault, Afterword: The Subject and Power (from Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow), p. 214.
123 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 225.
124 Michel Foucault, Afterword: The Subject and Power (from Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow), p. 214.
125 Ibid., p. 214.
126 Ibid., p. 214.
127 Ibid., p. 214.
178
6 THE ‘DOUBLE HETEROTOPIA’ OF KOWLOON WALLED CITY
This chapter unites some of the themes of Part III. Firstly, it is an example of the application of a Fou-
cauldian theory, i.e. the heterotopia, to an actual space – the now demolished Walled City of Kowloon in
Hong Kong. Secondly, by backing up the contention that the Walled City was a ‘double heterotopia’ (in
that it was a heterotopia within Hong Kong, which in turn acted as a heterotopia for Communist China)
use will be made of Michel Foucault’s work it as a better example of applying it than simply brandish-
ing it vaguely as a way of
backing up a political or
polemical stance. David
Grahame Shane’s Recom-
binant Urbanism does this
admirably, in a measured
and scholarly manner. As
we have already seen at
the end of Part II, in order
to gain a better perspective
on Shanghai this research
has been looking at Hong
Kong and Singapore.
The comparison between
Shanghai’s alleyway
house, which acts as a be-
nign panopticon, and Sin-
Figure 24. Kowloon Walled City, aerial view (source: City of Darkness: gapore’s more flexible but
Life in Kowloon Walled City, pp.10-11) ultimately less interesting
(i.e. socially) shophouse
has been fruitful. Hong
Kong, too, has proved a useful testing ground for Foucauldian theories, but before going into what made
the Kowloon Walled City such a good example of a heterotopia it may be useful to look at what Fou-
cault meant by the term.
Heterotopia
As this chapter deals with an issue that is too interesting to be left out, but does not directly relate
to Shanghai, it will consist of a cursory overview rather than the sort of detailed study that has
characterised the other chapters in this thesis. Briefly, Michel Foucault was invited by a group of
architects to make a study of space in 1966, at which time he mentioned in a lecture something he
called ‘heterotopias’, which he defined as ‘those singular spaces to be found in some given social spaces
whose functions are different or even the opposite of others’1. Foucault directly opposed heterotopias
to utopias, because whereas the utopia was a site with no real place, the heterotopia is a place that does
exist. He saw heterotopias as constituting ‘…a sort of counter arrangement, of effectively realized
utopia…’; he saw them as spaces that were ‘…absolutely other with respect to all the arrangements that
they reflect.’2. He also outlined six different types of them in this lecture: one, they can assume a wide
variety of forms but are not universal; two, they can change their function over time; three, they can
1 Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’ from The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to
Foucault’s Thoughts, Paul Rabinow, ed., p. 252.
2 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in
Cultural Theory, Neil Leach, ed., p. 352 (italics in original).
179
juxtapose different and incompatible spaces in a single real place; four, they are linked to slices of time;
five, they always presuppose a system of opening and closing; and six, they are a space of illusion more
real that the surrounding reality3.
The heterotopia is not particularly representative of Foucault’s oeuvre, most commentators
barely acknowledge its existence; conversely, most architects seem to notice nothing else. As we have
seen, Foucault placed the heterotopia in opposition to the utopia, the latter having a long tradition in
Western literature. Starting with Thomas More’s Utopia of 1516, where this idealised ‘no place’ was
not so much a representation of how the world could be, but was intended to be a satirical reflection of
the wickedness of contemporary Europe. All the same, utopias did afford consolation, they inhabited
a fantastic, untroubled region in which they unfolded their beautiful cities, with their vast avenues,
superbly planted gardens, and were surrounded by a country where life was easy.
As a genre it was popular: Francis Bacon’s unfinished New Atlantis, J.V. Andreae’s Christiano-
polis, Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, Samuel Gott’s New Jerusalem, and of course Jonathan
Swift’s biting satire Gulliver’s Travels all make use of the utopia. At around the beginning of the twenti-
eth century it once again enjoyed a vogue, with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, William Morris’s
News from Nowhere, and Samuel Butler’s classic Erehwon (which is, of course, ‘no where’ spelled
backwards).
The utopia did not begin with Thomas More, however, his work can be seen as following in
the tradition of The Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian description of paradise, or the description
of the Elysian Fields in Homer’s Odyssey, not to mention the numerous travellers’ tales influenced by
Pliny’s Natural History and Lucian’s True History.
The utopia may have been an idealised place, but the road to it was dangerous. Travellers often
arrived only after having suffered some kind of trauma, like a shipwreck or, for their twentieth-century
counterparts, an aeroplane crash: for example, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, or William Golding’s Lord
of the Flies – though this latter is more in the category of a dystopia, a peculiarly twentieth-century
phenomenon. Aldous Huxley made this twentieth-century development of the utopia genre, the dystopia,
his own with Brave New World, Ape and Essence, and Island, dystopias all, though George Orwell’s
1984 is probably the best known, certainly the most chilling.
The dystopia seemed to echo the pessimistic mood of the twentieth century (something that also
permeated the work of Michel Foucault), but even as a twentieth-century phenomenon the dystopia
could also be seen as having their roots firmly in the past, Gulliver’s Travels is arguably one (dating
from 1726), while Joseph Hall is credited with inventing the genre as far back as 1600 with his Mundus
Alter et Idem.
A dystopia is a place where things have gone horribly wrong, oftentimes they are places that
have actually managed to achieve their utopian aspirations only to find that it was not, after all, the
ideal it had seemed. Alex Garland’s The Beach is a recent example of this still-popular genre, where
(like Hilton’s Lost Horizon) a group of Westerners find themselves in an isolated paradise in the East,
not Shangri-La this time (the lamasery high in Hilton’s Himalayas), but a tropical island off the coast of
Thailand, hard to get to, and once there things start to go terribly wrong. The flight to the East is invari-
ably beguiling for a Westerner, but it is often fraught with danger, let us not forget that Manuel Castells
has warned that ‘all Utopias lead to Terror if there is a serious attempt at implementing them’4.
181
and transportation systems’6 and he examines the role a heterotopia plays in stabilising a city. Grahame
Shane sees heterotopias as spatial pockets or patches that bottle up change, thereby allowing urban
actors to conduct ‘concrete utopian experiments without endangering the established disequilibrium of
the larger system’7. If the experiment is successful, then actors can export the new model, copying it (or
altering it) so that it becomes a new norm over time. This is how what were once ‘surprising and surreal
juxtapositions’ can, and do, become integrated into social practices in the host city8.
Fundamental to David Grahame Shane’s understanding of the urbanisation process are three
basic components: the armature, the enclave, and the heterotopia, the three of which he sees as being the
basic components of any city. Components which are constantly ‘combined and recombined in different
cultures, places, and periods’9. Heterotopias, according to Grahame Shane:
[H]ouse all exceptions to the dominant city model. A heterotopia is a place that mixes the stasis
of the enclave with the flow of an armature, and in which the balance between these two systems
is constantly changing. Its function is to help maintain the city’s stability as a self-organizing
system. In a linear, logical, scientific urban system it helps maintain the dynamic overall
balance between the binary poles that define that a system (e.g., production and consumption)
by handling exceptions; in nonlinear systems, it facilitates dynamic imbalance and rapid shifts
between paradigms. In service of these functions, the form of the heterotopia itself is wildly
diverse and constantly in flux.10
The heterotopia is ‘an exceptional space, a miniature city or subcity that forms an important
part of the larger city’11. For Grahame Shane, the main source of confusion about heterotopias is their
role in facilitating and monitoring change, with much of the confusion stemming from the fact that
they are such complex enclaves. These places ‘provide shifting sites of reflection and distance within
the system that increase the city’s capacity to change or adapt over time’12. They are essential, as places
of exclusion, for the consistent (and logical) organising of human settlement within a given order;
dominant urban actors therefore also make use of the heterotopias because by them they are able to keep
their preferred order as pure and consistent as possible. Grahame Shane is quick to point out that ‘[a]
lthough the forms of these spaces have changed over time, the systemic reasons for their existence have
not. All social systems declare certain objects, things, relationships, and people taboo. Taboo objects,
things, relationships, and people that cannot actually be eliminated from a society, either because they
are necessary or ineradicable, must be segregated’13.
Much of the confusion about heterotopias comes from the fact that, as we have just seen, they
are complex enclaves, but complex or not, they are enclaves that can be found anywhere in any city.
Michel Foucault identified particular places where processes of change and hybridization are facilitated
in a city or society: he gave the examples of the hospital, the school, and the prison, where actors’
utopian aspirations could operate as rules and goals so that as competent professionals they could
seek to cure the ill, educate the ignorant, and reform the illegal activities of criminals. For Foucault,
all heterotopias have two aspects, a compensatory side, where codes and disciplines are enforced,
and an illusory one, where traces of the actors’ utopian goals can be found; in heterotopias of crisis
the compensatory and illusory sides mixed without difficulty, creating a blended, hybrid logic that is,
Part III is in many ways the most important section in this thesis. Michel Foucault’s analysis of space
and power relations, particularly how they are inscribed in the built environment, was used to ex-
plore and understand the public spaces of Shanghai, particularly the alleyway house. Space was of
central concern to Foucault, while his analysis of power relations challenged the tenets of Marxism
(which tended to focus on specific classes as holders of power). Foucault’s notion of a micro-physics
of power saw it as being exercised on the body not as a property but as a strategy – something we saw
illustrated by Arie Graafland’s analysis of Louis XIV’s use of the ballet in early-modern France, a time
when domination was achieved through manoeuvres and tactics, via a network of relations which were
constantly in tension, and was something that was activated rather than possessed. In other words,
power is exercised, it is not a possession.
Michel Foucault saw China as being devoted to the ordering of space, and it was to China that
this research took his work in order to investigate the alleyway house. The use of space in this typology,
which is unique to Shanghai, took as its point of departure the Foucauldian notion of the Panopticon.
In Jeremy Bentham’s famous prison plan visibility was a trap, it reversed the principle of the dungeon
by rendering the prisoner visible. In the Shanghai alleyway house there is visibility in the hierarchical
arrangement of the public space as people move through the graduated privacy from public street to
private house. As a result everybody is able to benefit from this visibility. This is a clear rejection of the
pessimistic notion of the panoptic society, and the carceral archipelago. This research sees the benign
panopticon of the Shanghai alleyway house as something that has given the city its rich and vibrant
street life; these are the living links that underpin the notion of consanguinity, and it is these links that
we should be seeking to recapture in the city today, not merely attempting to gentrify the shells of empty
houses.
Part III also saw the use made of Foucault’s work by other academics, notably Edward W. Said’s
in his book Orientalism. Said saw some good things having resulted from Western hegemony over
that part of the world he so singularly defined as the Orient (such as the Renaissance-like revivals in
local culture that resulted from an interest in them by colonial elites), but Said generally thought that
imperialistic influence was debilitating and dangerous. Orientalism’s sequel, Culture and Imperialism,
continued in a similar vein, but, as we saw in the critiques by Robert Irwin and Ibn Warraq, Said clearly
overvalued the role of the intellectual, seeming to think that the problems of the Middle East could be
solved by critical reading skills. Said also misunderstood the Foucauldian notion of discourse, leading
him to make his most damaging statement: ‘It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could
say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’. By way
of balance, we saw the apposite use being made by David Grahame Shane of Foucault’s notion of the
heterotopia in his analysis of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City.
184
PART IV
CHINA AND CULTURE
Shanghai, this electric and lurid city more exciting than any other in the world… As always, the spec-
tacle outside the theatre far exceeded anything shown on its screen.
J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun
Part IV sees us return to China in an effort to examine the cultural construction of perception. We will
be looking at the historical trajectory of China’s culture in Chapter 1, with particular attention being paid
to the Chinese practice of feng shui. This historical analysis also includes a brief look at Western percep-
tions of China, especially how these turned from the quaint chinoiserie of the eighteenth century into
the ‘Yellow Peril’ of the nineteenth. Chapter 2 deals with the issue of language, and how it enables us to
communicate, provided, as we saw in Part III’s introduction to Michel Foucault, we use it correctly. The
final chapter looks at recent portrayals of Shanghai in film and literature, taking as its point of departure
Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans as this novel seems to unite so many of the themes that have
been recurring throughout this entire investigation, beginning, of course, with the idea of the investiga-
tion itself. This novel is set largely in the 1930s and sees its hero, a celebrated detective, returning to his
childhood home in search of his lost parents. This last chapter also takes a look at some film portrayals
of the city, beginning with The White Countess, which deals with a dance-hall hostess, and is also set
in the 1930s, as well as Shanghai Triad, which will include a note on M. Christine Boyer’s analysis of
it. All of these works raise in one way or another the issue of nostalgia, something that seems to recur
again and again in portrayals of Shanghai, and is something that we must ever be on guard against.
First we shall take a look at the Chinese mentalité1. We have already seen the West’s perception
of Chinese strangeness, so beautifully exemplified by Borges’ Chinese encyclopaedia. This perceived
strangeness is the result of what anthropologists call an aspect of territorial or communitarian rigid-
ity, also known as pseudo-speciation. Richard Sennett tells us that this is where a tribe acts as though
it is the only assemblage of human beings who are really human2. In preferring the term mentalité over
mind-set use will be made of what Michel Foucault called the ‘framework of thought of any given pe-
riod’, or the historical outline of the speculative interests, beliefs, or broad theoretical options of a time.
This is what, in any given period, delimits a field of knowledge, defining the mode of being of the ob-
jects that appear in that field. This is also what provides man’s everyday perception with such theoretical
powers and defines the conditions under which he can sustain a discourse about things that are recogn-
ised to be true3.
1 I am indebted to Patrick Healy for suggesting this term to me as it so much more effectively captures the
nuance of what I wish to communicate than the more usual English ‘mind-set’; I wish to point out, however, that
despite this study’s examination of China’s long history, and its social structure, I am not intending the term to be
a reference to the use made by the Annales School (which was established in Strasburg in 1929 and included such
intellectuals as Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, Maurice Halbwachs, André Siegfried, Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie, and Georges Duby).
2 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, p. 308.
3 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 158.
185
1 THE CHINESE MENTALITÉ
Confucianism is making a comeback in China. Attacked under the ‘Four Olds’ during the Cultural
Revolution, the sage’s thinking has once again begun to find popularity in a China changing so fast
that anything that resonates with old-fashioned values has become increasingly welcome. The fact that
Confucius’s philosophy is one of practical governance has also not been lost on the Chinese authorities.
Since becoming China’s leader in 2002, President Hu Jintao has promoted a succession of official
slogans such as ‘Harmonious Society’ and ‘Xiaokang Shehui’ (‘a moderately well-off society’)1, which
have distinctly Confucian undertones, which we shall see in a moment. A melding of Confucianism with
Communism is increasingly being seen as a good way for the Party to go, particularly as Confucianism,
unlike Communism, is home-grown.
Confucian study programmes are springing up throughout the Chinese education system,
including even kindergarten classes where children are made to recite the classics, philosophy
departments in universities are offering Confucian programmes, and there are even Confucian-
themed executive education programmes aimed at business people2. It might seem strange for a
communist party to be interested in what is perceived by many as being a religion, but the whole point
about Confucianism is that it is not a religion, it was a secular doctrine aimed at national comity, and as
such contrasts vividly with Buddhism, late-Daoism, and the other, often syncretic, faiths that have long
been practiced in China.
This chapter takes a look at some of the recent developments in China, which we have also been
looking at in Part I, from the point of view of Chinese philosophy, particularly the application of what is
seen by many in the West as a quaint superstition, feng shui. The ramifications this belief system has had
on China’s built environment has a lot more in common with the practical doctrines of Confucius than
the esoterica of either Buddhism or Daoism3.
China is a new world power, physically it is the world’s third largest country, it is also the
world’s most populous. It dominates the Pacific coastline of continental Asia, and shares over 14,000 ki-
lometres of land frontier with over a dozen countries, including fellow giants Russia and India. Chinese
civilisation is ancient, it is generally regarded to be the world’s longest continuous civilisation, yet if
we compare it to that of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia we can see that it is one that remained relatively
primitive until relatively late. Though Chinese inventiveness is the stuff of legend4, metallurgy only
began in China a full 1,000 years later than in Mesopotamia; and as for social organisation, the earliest
Chinese state is unlikely to have existed before about 2000 BCE, by which time many Mesopotamian
city-states were ancient and several Egyptian dynasties had fallen.
The development of Chinese civilisation remarkably parallels that of Europe, with the first pe-
riod of strength and unity under China’s Qin and Han dynasties occurring at more or less the same time
as the domination of Europe by Rome. In fact it is probably this that seems so extraordinary to us in
the West today, who tend to see the Roman Empire as unutterably distant. To think that the same pol-
ity, more or less, with the same borders, again more or less, has existed in China since the time of the
Roman Empire is really rather remarkable. As Neil Leach says, if we were to compare this sustained
continuity to Europe it would be as if the Roman Empire were actually still in place, with Latin a major
international language in common everyday use5.
Despite opening up in recent decades, China still remains little known or understood by outsid-
ers. Relatively few foreigners, even the ones living there, learn its language or make more than a cur-
[I]n the networks of information exchange and symbol manipulation, which relate social
actors, institutions, and cultural movements, through icons, spokespersons, and intellectual
amplifiers. In the long run, it does not really matter who is in power because the distribution of
political roles becomes widespread and rotating. There are no more stable power elites. There
are however, elites from power; that is, elites formed during their usually brief power tenure, in
which they take advantage of their privileged political position to gain a more permanent access
to material resources and social connections. Culture as the source of power, and power as the
source of capital, underlie the new social hierarchy of the Information Age16.
Chinese history
Jane Jacobs has also mentioned Mesopotamia in connection with China, pointing out that both of
these cultures had ‘early and long leads over European cultures’17. Both of them, however, eventually
succumbed to long declines, with insidiously growing poverty and backwardness relative to Europe.
While Jacobs is quick to point out that neither experienced the extremes of a Dark Ages their early
leads were certainly not sustained in the long run. Their failures remind us that strong and successful
cultures can and do fail. And that this failure is the result, not of a conquering force from outside, as
was so often the case when indigenous cultures came to be colonised, but resulted from a stagnation
from within, what Jacobs sees as an ‘internal rot in the form of fatal cultural turnings, not recognized
as wrong turnings while they occur or soon enough afterward to be correctable’18. According to Jacobs,
Chinese cities throughout the long history of the Chinese Empire, had no feedback. And as we have seen
in the work of David Grahame Shane, feedback is of vital importance for an urban organism to survive
and prosper. Long before the Chinese Empire was solidified, all the bases of China’s artistic and mate-
rial culture had been developed. Under unification China never equalled its earlier fantastic capabilities
for development or fulfilled the promise that these had implied. Jacobs sees China as having been ‘[s]
o immemorially stagnant… that by this century [the twentieth] some 80 percent of its population was
13 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age, Volume II, p. 337.
14 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium: The Information Age, Volume III, p. 326.
15 Ibid., p. 326.
16 Ibid., p. 379 (italics in original).
17 Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, p. 13.
18 Ibid., p. 14.
188
rural’19.
China consists of 1.3 billion people, made up of 56 diverse ethnic groups, 92 percent of whom
are known as Han20. A 500,000-year-old skull was discovered in the Zhoukoudian area on the outskirts
of Beijing, known as the Peking Man, this makes the origins of the Chinese people very ancient in-
deed21. The earliest identified inhabitants of China were known as the Huaxia, and they prospered and
multiplied to become the largest ethnic group on earth. It was China’s sophisticated agriculture that
gave them this early lead, and is what John Darwin has identified as a continuous process of agricultural
colonisation that has carried Chinese culture across the northern plains as well as through the Yangtze
valley to the south22.
It was this southward expansion that actually ‘made’ China, adding a hugely productive
agricultural region to the country’s domain. The wet-cultivation of rice, which could produce two or
three harvests per year, substantially boosted food supplies (though wheat and millet remained staples
in the north, as they do to this day). And it was the sub-tropical south which also stimulated domestic
trade. The expansion southwards encouraged the emergence of a commercial economy between 900
CE and 1300 CE where different geographical regions were linked by a network of waterways, which
led to an increase in specialisation (because necessities could be brought in from afar), and an elaborate
credit system to facilitate it, leading to the introduction of paper money23. This infrastructure made
China wealthy, but it also ensured the necessity of active government involvement for the building
and maintenance of the waterways, which in this way were not unlike the railways of the Victorian
era, also a network which opened up a territory for trade. (In fact it was China’s waterway network
that was instrumental in keeping railways out of the country until well into the twentieth century.) The
China of this era is sometimes seen as having been the victim of its own success. The efficiency of
its pre-industrial economy discouraged any radical shift in production techniques, and local shortages
that would usually drive innovation were mitigated by resources from other regions that could be
brought in. This situation, as we have seen earlier, is known as a high-level equilibrium trap, and is one
where a society may enjoy centuries of economic success, ultimately, however, with no need to do so,
the society simply never improves or develops24.
China’s remarkable cultural cohesion was not simply the result of commercial or infrastructural
innovation, it was something that had been developed much earlier, and was the result of a body of
literature designed to inculcate citizenship and loyalty in its people. One of the most important figures in
its canon was Confucius. It was the entrenchment of the moral and philosophical outlook derived from
Confucius’s texts and perpetuated by a scholar elite that sealed China’s identity for the next two-and-
a-half millennia. China developed a bureaucracy where candidates were selected on merit according to
how they performed in public examinations. During the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) the grading sys-
tem was refined with successful candidates being awarded degrees such as Tong zi (Bachelor), Xiu chai
(Good Scholar), Ju ren (Recommended Scholar) and Jin Si (Advanced Scholar). This examination sys-
tem reached its peak during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 CE) and was only abolished in 1912 with the
foundation of the new Republic25.
John Darwin sees the adoption of literati ideals by the provincial gentry (also known as the
scholar gentry) as a vital stage in China’s transition from a semi-feudal society (where power was
wielded by landholders) into an agrarian empire26. This imperial system was able to rely on the loyalty
of local elites, whose own prestige was closely bound up with the prestige of the imperial centre, which
19 Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, p. 177.
20 Li Xiaoxiang, Origins of Chinese People and Customs, p. 1.
21 Ibid., p. 11.
22 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 40.
23 Ibid., p. 41.
24 Ibid., p. 45.
25 Evelyn Lip, ‘The Examination System (Kao Shi)’, Notes on Things Chinese, pp. 46-47.
26 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. 43.
189
in turn facilitated a system of long-distance rule that proved remarkably successful and enduring. It
might be useful to add that the fact the Chinese also made use of a character-based script probably
enabled the dissemination of their canon among the literati more easily than any alphabet-based system
could have done. Characters, even today (at least for the Chinese dialects that are written – but almost
all now are) can be read and understood nationally, even if reading them aloud would result in mutual
incomprehension.
The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE)27 re-established Peking (Beijing) as the imperial capital
in 1420. Once the Grand Canal had assured food supplies for the city (which came from the Yangtze
valley), the new dynasty turned its attention to the Confucian texts, making it into a state orthodoxy and
fostering its scholarship. The Ming were the real founders of this government system, which lasted until
1912. These concerns all tied neatly together because of the Ming emperors’ embracing of an agrarian
ideology, where land was seen as the true wealth, and which fitted in neatly with Confucian beliefs. The
Qing Dynasty which followed continued to uphold Confucianism as state orthodoxy, probably out of a
somewhat more cynical self-interest, as they were foreign invaders, perceived by the Han Chinese as
barbarian outsiders from the uncouth north. The Qing were Manchurian and had changed their name in
order to sound more Chinese. As Manchus they did not bind their women’s feet (only the Han did that),
but they did imposed the queue (the trademark pigtail) on their Chinese subjects.
29 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, pp. 200-201.
191
added humiliation for the so-called Manchu Dynasty of seeing Russia and Japan make ever more
substantial inroads into their erstwhile homeland of Manchuria in the north. Yet China managed to
escape partition, even though this, as we have seen in Part I, was more the result of a stalemate between
the great powers than any home-grown effort on the part of the Chinese. So long as the great powers got
their trading rights, and could operate unmolested out of the treaty ports, they seemed happy enough.
Oddly it was the railways that eventually precipitated the final collapse of a defunct Qing
Dynasty in 1911. The government in Beijing, in an effort to shore up its dissolving authority, and bolster
its finances, had proposed to take over the new railways, taking them out of the hands of the provincial
authorities, and depriving them of valuable income. And it was this that finally triggered the revolt that
brought the dynasty down.
Feng shui
Now we come to some aspects of Chinese thinking that may seem to us in the West to smack of super-
stition, yet they nonetheless have philosophical implications (or at least underpinnings). Take practices
such as tai chi chuan, acupuncture, or feng shui. The Chinese have always had different ways of doing
things, after all Borges, apart from his encyclopaedia, has pointed out that ‘[w]alling in an orchard or a
garden is ordinary, but not walling in an empire’30. We shall be dealing with the actual meaning of the
names for these activities in the next chapter, as well as a number of other key concepts that are difficult
to transliterate into English, what we shall be looking at in this section is the application of what can be
likened to a pseudo-science. This term is not meant in any disparaging way, it simply means that feng
shui has a somewhat rigorous, almost scientific methodology in its application and yet remains at heart
something so ineffable that we in the West have difficulty grasping it (at least outside the fashionable
realm of interior decoration). In its way it could perhaps be compared to the Western practice of psycho-
analysis, another field where a lot is taken on faith and yet its practitioners flatter themselves that their
methods are scientific.
We have already seen in Part I the importance of city shape to the Chinese, particularly the
square shape for centres of civil or spiritual importance, Beijing has such a shape. Cities engaged in
activities perceived to be of lesser significance to the Chinese, such as trade, invariably had the more
usual round shape, as was the case in Shanghai. The siting of a city is also determined by any number of
factors, Shanghai, having no cultural significance, was left to its own devices, a settlement establishing
itself on the Huangpo River near to the point where it joins the Yangtze River, just before debouching
into the East China Sea. Beijing, on the other hand, was laid out in strict accordance with the precepts of
feng shui (as was Kowloon Walled City, as we have seen).
The practice of feng shui originated in China sometime in the tenth century BCE. It aims to po-
sition buildings and/or furniture in harmony with their environment for the benefit of their users. It is
also very important for the correct orientation of tombstones (we have already seen the importance of
such orientation for Christian churches and graves for the West in the Middle Ages). Good orientation
means the buildings’ users can benefit from qi. Qi is a very difficult concept to render into English as
it can mean ‘matter’, ‘energy’, or ‘breath’. Perhaps ‘vital breath’ is the best term to capture its nuance
and importance. People have qi, so too do places, even the heavens, in the most practical way, have
qi – the Chinese word for ‘the weather’ is tian qi (crudely translated, this could be rendered as ‘sky en-
ergy’). And while on the subject of crude translations, the invariable description of feng shui as meaning
‘wind-water’ is simply incorrect, why this is so will be explained in the next chapter when describing
the ‘snowball effect’ in the Chinese language, suffice to say that feng does mean ‘wind’ and shui ‘water’,
however together they mean ‘geomancy’, with the whole of the term exceeding the sum of its parts.
Unlike in Western science where the ‘environment’ as a concept is often broken down and
analysed as separate categories, according to Brenda S.A. Yeoh, feng shui unifies ‘the geological, at-
30 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Wall and the Books’, Labyrinths, p. 221.
192
mospheric, aesthetic, and psychological qualities of the environment in one theory and code of practice
which is seen as integral to the lives of the people’31. Yeoh states that Chinese cities were conceived as
‘cosmo-magical symbols’32 of the universe, a view which stems from Oswald Spengler’s basic concep-
tion of space in Chinese culture as a being path which meanders through the world, where the individual
is conducted to his god or ancestral tomb by nature via a devious series of doors, bridges, hills and walls
(a way of thinking that clearly resonates with Daoist notions).33 Yeoh also notes that inherent in feng
shui was the notion that human intervention in the landscape was fraught with risk and could generate
repercussions for society34.
Feng shui takes a holistic approach to man and his environment and as such reflects the general
Chinese attitude which tends to see all elements in the world as one great chain of being (as is the case
with Daoist belief). Some other Chinese practices that reflect this way of thinking are traditional medi-
cine, which treats the entire body regardless of the symptoms of illness. This approach takes account
of physical, psychological, and physiological factors and considers the body as a system of delicately
balanced yin and yang elements which must be in harmony with one another to ensure a person’s proper
health. Some of the techniques of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) include acupuncture, which
consists of inserting needles along the body’s meridian points to stimulate the circulation of qi. Another
technique, perhaps not so well-known as acupuncture in the West, is moxibustion, where cigar-like
moxa sticks are held over the body’s acupressure points.
Practices such as these, which were not understood by colonial authorities in places like Hong
Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai, did not fare well when subjected to the Western medical gaze. Colonial
authorities were quick to declare such practices quackery and suppress them. Western medicine was a
sanitary science, it regarded diseases as the product of germs which could to be conquered by using sci-
entific means, Traditional Chinese Medicine’s focusing on the correcting of imbalances was one which
aimed at strengthening the body’s resistance rather than attacking a pathogenic invader. Colonial author-
ities, supremely conscious of the superiority of their own medical practices, had little interest in what
they clearly regarded as an inferior calling, classing it as folklore or even mere superstition.
Other aspects of this holistic Chinese approach to the body and health can be seen in the daily
practice of activities such as qi gong and tai chi chuan. The former is an exercise to control breathing,
which regulates the activity of the cerebral cortex and can reduces stress and allow the body to function
more efficiently. The latter, formerly a martial art, now aims at building up the body’s inner strength by
controlled breathing and movement. These activities can be seen practiced by Chinese, old and young,
everywhere in Shanghai (and also, to a lesser extent in Hong Kong and Singapore), in fact Shanghai’s
old colonial public spaces, such as Fuxing Park and the Bund, are thronged with people engaging in
these exercises, particularly in the early morning.
31 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi-
ronment, p. 292.
32 Ibid., p. 281.
33 Cited in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban
Built Environment, p. 291.
34 Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi-
ronment, p. 291.
193
is what Ronald G. Knapp would call the ‘“architecture of Chineseness” that links many realms’35.
The form of the Chinese house is flexible enough to enable the family that lives in it to enlarge,
or reduce, according to circumstances. This it is able to do thanks to the unique system of interlocking
wooden framework the Chinese have devised. Used for both architecture and furniture, this system is
held together by a mortise-and-tenon joinery system which does not use adhesives or fasteners36. This
system was in place seven thousand years ago in the Neolithic Hemudu society (in Zhejiang Province).
It means that houses can be extended
in any direction to meet changing
requirements. The Chinese house
basically describes a rectangle, within
which can be found the most subtle
and complicated patterns of spatial
relationships expressing age, gender,
and generational status, as well as
places for child rearing and the care of
the elderly.
At the heart of the Chinese
home lies the courtyard, and in the
houses of the rich, there may even
be more than one. Nancy Shatzman
Steinhardt has identified more than
Figure 26. Siheyuan (source: House Home Family: Living twenty varieties of the basic courtyard-
style house, with shapes being
and Being Chinese, p.42)
influenced by regional variations.
In central Shanxi, for example, they
tend to be rectangular while those in south-eastern Shanxi have two- or even three-storey buildings
surrounding them. In Ningxia, the courtyards of the Hui are some of the few that are not oriented
south, while in Jilin they have heatable platforms on three sides, something necessary for the cold
Manchurian winters37. Ronald G. Knapp notes that courtyards tend to be comparatively expansive in
north and north-eastern China, but are usually quite condensed in the south38. The Chinese term for a
courtyard is tianjing (skywell), a typically robust Chinese description, and one that becomes even more
appropriate in dwellings with more than one storey, as was the case in Shanghai, where there was such a
premium on space.
The most typical expression of the Chinese courtyard home can be found in the north of the
country. Known as siheyuan, it consisted of an open-air quadrangle surrounded by low buildings, and
its origins go back to the eleventh century BCE. The back walls lack windows or doors, and these
homes were invariably laid out along the cardinal points with the main halls generally facing south.
Each siheyuan had at least one courtyard at its centre, which would cover approximately 40 percent
of the total area of the dwelling, while some had additional courtyards to the front and/or rear. Visitors
and residents would move through these courtyards in a sequence of what Nelson Wu calls ‘graduated
privacy’, with casual visitors invited only as far as the entry vestibule, while the first-level courtyard
and adjacent halls were privileged spaces for relatives and family friends. Deeper within the dwelling
35 Ronald G. Knapp, ‘China’s Houses, Homes and Families’, from House Home Family: Living and Being
Chinese, Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo, eds., p. 2.
36 Kai-yin Lo, ‘Traditional Chinese Architecture and Furniture’, from House Home Family: Living and Be-
ing Chinese, Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo, eds., p. 193.
37 Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, ‘The House: An Introduction’, from House Home Family: Living and Being
Chinese, Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo, eds., p. 27.
38 Ronald G. Knapp, ‘In Search of the Elusive Chinese House’, from House Home Family: Living and Be-
ing Chinese, Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo, eds., p. 47.
194
was the realm of privacy for the women of the traditional family39. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties
these siheyuan were jammed closely together in cities along narrow lanes, in Beijing these were called
hutong, and they in turn influenced the late flowering of the Shanghai alleyway house.
One final note before leaving the topic of feng shui is to warn against taking too romantic a view
of it. Yes, as a practice it seems to resonate well with twenty-first-century concerns for environmental
awareness, it has also gained an increased currency in building practice in the West, but what must be
borne in mind is the fact that for all its sensitivity to its surroundings feng shui has not prevented the
Chinese from doing sometimes irreparable damage to their country, and this was even before the onset
of Western-style industrialisation.
39 Ibid., p. 27.
195
2 A NOTE ON LANGUAGE
When Confucius was asked what was the first thing he would do if he was ever asked to lead a state, he
answered: ‘Rectify the language’1. Gore Vidal sees a decadent society as one which allows its language
to grow decadent; one where words are no longer used to illuminate but to disguise and mislead. Words,
and how they are used, are vitally important. As we saw at the beginning of Part III, language makes
communication possible, but only on condition that it is used properly. If one wants to communicate,
one has no other option other than to subscribe to the meanings already assigned in a given language.
Words have specific meanings, and if one wants to use them to communicate a specific nuance then
one must use a specific word; indeed one can use no other. Word order too is important: as the old ad-
age has it, there is all the difference between a ‘chestnut horse’ and a ‘horse chestnut’; which is why
David Harvey’s term ‘time-space compression’ is probably preferable to Marshall Berman’s ‘space-
time feeling’, as the latter seems to suggest science fiction rather than earthy fact.
Colonial authorities understood all too well the importance of words, they knew the implications
that resulted from an act of naming, which is something we shall see in a moment when we look at how
different languages reflect the different environments that have brought them into being. Particular at-
tention will be paid to the Chinese language, taking certain key terms as examples. The Chinese scope
for subtlety of expression and nuance will also be compared to the more precise, and concise, Western
languages, particularly Latin, which is the root of so many of them. First of all, however, it might be
helpful to return briefly to the work of Michel Foucault, for whom the peculiar property possessed by a
language, as opposed to any other system of signs, was of vital importance.
In his work on language, Michel Foucault drew a comparison between the Chinese character-
based script and the alphabetic system, where he sees the latter as being ‘a form of duplication, since
it represents not the signified but the phonetic elements by which it is signified’2. What he calls the
ideogram, on the other hand, ‘directly represents the signified, independently from a phonetic system
which is another mode of representation’3. In The Order of Things Foucault cites Claude Duret as
pointing out that the Hebrews, Canaans, Samaritans, Chaldeans, Syrians, Egyptians, Carthaginians,
Phoenicians, Arabs, Saracens, Turks, Moors, Persians, and Tartars all wrote from right to left, which was
seen as following ‘the course and daily movement of the first heaven, which is most perfect, according
to the opinion of the great Aristotle, tending towards unity’4. The Greeks, Georgians, Maronites,
Serbians, Jacobites, Copts, Poznanians, as well as of course the Romans and all their European
descendants, write from left to right, following ‘the course and movement of the second heaven, home
of the seven planets’5. While the Indians, Chinese, and Japanese all write from top to bottom (or at least
they used to), which Claude Duret saw as being in conformity with the ‘order of nature, which has given
men heads at the tops of their bodies and feet at the bottom’6.
This is all very interesting, but what is actually clever about it is the fact that what Michel
Foucault points out as being important is not so much the direction the text is written in as the order in
which the words are placed: ‘what renders foreign languages opaque to one another, and so difficult to
translate, is not so much the differences between the words as the incompatibility of their sequences’7.
Foucault then goes on to differentiate between what he colourfully refers to as the ‘singing vowels
speaking our passions; [and] the rough consonants our needs’, pointing out that it is ‘still possible
[O]ccupied a fundamental situation in relation to all knowledge: it was only by the medium of
language that the things of the world could be known. Not because it was a part of the world,
ontologically interwoven with it (as in the Renaissance), but because it was the first sketch of an
8 Ibid., p. 103.
9 Ibid., p. 112.
10 Ibid., p. 112.
11 Ibid., p. 112.
12 Ibid., p. 284.
13 Ibid., p. 286.
14 Ibid., p. 290.
15 Ibid., p. 290.
16 Ibid., p. 295.
17 Ibid., pp. 295-296.
197
order in representations of the world; because it was the initial, inevitable way of representing
representations. It was in language that all generality was formed. Classical knowledge
was profoundly nominalist.18
Foucault sees language as having begun to ‘fold in upon itself’ from the nineteenth century onwards, a
time when it began to ‘acquire its own particular density, to deploy a history, an objectivity, and laws of
its own’19. This was the time when language became:
[O]ne object of knowledge among others, on the same level as living beings, wealth and value,
and the history of events and men. It may possess its own concepts, but the analyses that
bear upon it have their roots at the same level as those that deal with other empirical forms
of knowledge. The preeminence that enabled general grammar to be logic while at the same
time intersecting with it has now been lost. To know language is no longer to come as close as
possible to knowledge itself; it is merely to apply the methods of understanding in general to a
particular domain of objectivity.20
18 Ibid., p. 296.
19 Ibid., p. 296.
20 Ibid., p. 296.
21 Francis Bacon, Of Empire, p. 26.
22 Ted C. Fishman, China, Inc., p. 276.
198
and economic changes in society.
Along with the development of pinyin, the Chinese authorities have modernised the Chinese
language itself. As has already been mentioned, Chinese script is now written from left to right, not top
to bottom or right to left as it variously was. Chinese characters have also been simplified, reducing the
number of strokes, etc., which has, oddly enough, resulted in a strange sort of dislocation between the
mainland Chinese and the overseas Chinese communities. A cursory glance through the street signage
of Amsterdam’s Chinatown shows that they still tend use the old-fashioned characters. Hong Kong and
Taiwan, too, adhere to the old ways, leaving Hong Kong with the slightly anomalous situation of being
a hyper-modern metropolis whose citizens can only read and write a quaint and old-fashioned Chinese.
Singapore has adopted the new Chinese standard and promotes the teaching of Mandarin (known as
putonghua) as a way of encouraging business and cultural links with the country many Singaporeans
still see as their spiritual heartland, but also as a way of fostering ties between the many different intra-
national Chinese groups, such as Hokkien, Hakka, Haklo, Cantonese, Teochew, etc., who have made
Singapore their home. One other innovation in the writing of Chinese is that for the first time ever some
basic punctuation has been adopted: for example, commas, full stops, etc.
China was only ever semi-colonial, this was something that was discussed at length in Parts I
and II of this thesis, but one of the most important aspects of this is the fact that the Chinese did not
have to adopt, as did the Indians (and the Irish) a foreign language into their daily lives. Leo Ou-fan Lee
points out that this means that China’s long and deeply entrenched tradition of writing Chinese remained
unchallenged by any foreign language throughout its history23. Even during the era of the unequal
treaties Chinese writers continued to write poetry and fiction in their own language, a language that was
becoming increasingly enriched from its absorption of foreign influences. The reader will remember
that the word ‘modern’ was first transliterated into Chinese in Shanghai during this era. Other concepts,
such as the Western notion of love, have also found their way into the Chinese language: the word for a
spouse is airen (literally ‘love person’) and reflects a startling new notion for the Chinese, namely that
someone could actually marry for love, and not simply because their parents had found them a suitable
match.
The effects that the imposition of a foreign language can have on a native culture are not going
to be lamented here – Foucault’s invading aristocracy pretty much sums up Ireland in the twelfth
century, the beginning of a slow and often bloody process that led to that country’s almost complete
conversion to an English-speaking nation by the twentieth century – because as we have seen with
India, it is sometimes advantageous to be able to speak English. The English, as colonial masters, were
peculiarly adept at imposing their language on the territories they conquered.
Edward W. Said saw Ireland under the British as being ‘subjected to innumerable
metamorphoses through repeated settling projects and, in culmination, its virtual incorporation in 1801
through the Act of Union’24. This is true. Ireland occupies an interesting position vis-à-vis colonialism,
because whereas most commentators see Ireland as a colonised country, its elite very often filled
positions in the upper echelons of the colonial power structures abroad. These people may not have
had quite the numerical presence of the Scots, but they were every bit as loyal as servants of the British
Empire.
Ireland was, after 1801, a fully fledged part of the United Kingdom, and remained so until the
twenty-six counties became a Free State in 1922 (although still united with England under the crown
until being declared a Republic in 1948). Edward W. Said’s point draws our attention to the important
role the English language had in subjugating Ireland during the nineteenth century, and he cites the
Ordnance Survey, begun in 1824, the goal of which was to anglicise Irish place names. The main aim
of the exercise was to redraw land boundaries and permit the proper valuation of property, but its effect
was to further subjugate the Irish population. This survey was carried out by an almost entirely English
25 Ibid., p. 226.
26 Ibid., p. 226.
27 John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire, p. xiii.
28 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi-
ronment, p. 221.
29 Ibid., p. 222.
30 J. E. Spencer, quoted in Brenda S.A. Yeoh’s Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations
and the Urban Built Environment, p. 232.
200
adopted’31.
China has not undertaken any great project of renaming towns and cities to shake off any of their
semi-colonial associations, they have nothing in common with the desire of inhabitants of Ceylon to
be known as Sri Lankans, or the Siamese as Thai. Any changes to English versions of place names in
China are simply the result of changing the transliteration system from the Wade-Giles to pinyin, hence
Chongqing and Nanjing have replaced the more old-fashioned Chungking and Nanking. Shanghai, by
happy accident, remains unaffected. Some street names in the city have been changed, however, but then
some small changes may well have been expected.
What is most apparent in Chinese place names is their robust geographical directness, we have
already seen how Shanghai means ‘the place where the sea begins’ (or, more usually, ‘on the sea’),
and Beijing means ‘northern capital’. Other place names reflect other geographical features and act as
markers localising the place that they are referring to. For example, Shandong and Hunan mean ‘east
of the mountain’ and ‘south of the lake’ respectively. It is this simple directness in the use of Chinese
characters that we will now turn our attention by looking at some key Chinese concepts.
Names, no doubt, are whimsical draughtsmen, giving us of people as well as of places sketches
so unlike the reality that we often experience a kind of stupor when we have before our eyes, in
place of the imagined, the visible world (which, for that matter, is not the real world, our senses
being little more endowed than our imagination with the art of portraiture – so little, indeed, that
the final approximately lifelike pictures which we manage to obtain of reality are at least as dif-
ferent from the visible world as that was from the imagined).33
We will now turn our attention to some key Chinese names. Names that seem to reflect China’s richly
nuanced mode of expression.
Being used to the Western alphabetical system of organising a dictionary makes looking up a
word in a Chinese one rather difficult. One has to know which part of the character, also known as an
ideograph (or what Foucault referred to as an ‘ideogram’) is the radical. Radicals are characters that
represent basic concepts in Chinese, such as rice, the sun, to see, etc., and there are over 200 of these,
of which 92 are about the most common. Combined with other characters or ideographs, these radicals
set the tone, as it were, of a word’s meaning. These meanings then tend to be clustered in a combinatory
way: for example, the character ren, for person, can be combined with ai (love) to make airen, which, as
we have already seen, means spouse34. Once one has identified the radical, one then needs to be able to
count the number of stokes contained in the character as a whole (and there are eight different types of
stroke, with as many as 36 strokes in any given character – and that is in simplified Chinese); then by a
process of cross-referencing one can run through the shortlist of characters contained at the beginning of
every standard Chinese dictionary, and find the list of the ones that contain the correct radical element as
well as the requisite number of strokes; from this one can then go to the page indicated in the dictionary
31 Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Envi-
ronment, p. 235.
32 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘Rhizome’ from On the Line, p. 13.
33 Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (Volume II of Remembrance of Things Past), p. 141.
34 For a full list of Chinese terms used throughout this thesis, both in pinyin (Roman letters) and putonghua
(Chinese characters) and with their English transliterations, please refer to Appendix 4.
201
to find what one is looking for. While this is all undeniably trickier than looking up things in a diction-
ary of a Western language, once a certain level of competence has been attained in Chinese, especially
an ability to recognise the radicals (as well as count the number of strokes) then the logic in a Chinese
dictionary seems surprisingly elegant.
It is this same logic that is contained within the seemingly odd list of elements listed in Borges’s
Chinese encyclopaedia. This is the way in which the Chinese organise their world: they cluster things.
Even if Borges presumably simply made up his list, its oddness can now be explained by the fact that
words can be linked to one another in a Chinese dictionary simply because they contain the same radi-
cal; and this clustering can make for some odd bedfellows: the God the police worship is the same as
the one venerated by the illegal triads, because they both happen to be organisations; while the God
worshipped by scaffolders is the same as for opera troupes because the wayang (travelling opera troupe)
had to make use of the same techniques as scaffolders in the construction of their stages. The logic,
once it becomes apparent, is compelling, and may well have a sounder basis than the Western system
of clustering things as disparate as aardvarks, aeroplanes, and ataxia together simply because they all
happen to begin with the letter ‘a’.
In 1582 Matteo Ricci first saw Chinese ideographs in Macau and was struck by their potential
for use as a universal language system35 (something Leibniz was also to think of a century or so later).
Chinese people who can read are able to understand one another’s writing even if their dialects are
different, something that can never be the case with an alphabet-based system. Ricci also thought that
Chinese characters could transcend the differences inherent in pronunciation, sadly here he was wrong;
while it is true that Chinese characters are national, and can be comprehended for their meanings in the
different Chinese dialects, the different ways of reading these characters aloud renders them mutually
incomprehensible. However, the very fact that anyone who can read a Chinese character can apprehend
its meaning regardless of which dialect they speak is remarkable and as far removed from the Western
alphabetic system as to seem almost miraculous.
Jonathan D. Spence maintains that a Chinese sentence can be presented as a series of sharply
detailed images, and cites Matteo Ricci’s observation that ‘[Chinese] words have no articles, no cases,
no number, no gender, no tense, no mood; they just solve their problems with certain adverbial forms
which can be explained very easily’36. This is substantially true. Chinese sentences often begin with
time and place, to let the listener know the when and where of what is being talked about. The observant
reader will remember that this thesis has done the same by referring to Chapter 1 of Part I as ‘Shanghai
Now’. Chinese speakers also often have to clarify whether they are talking about a male or a female, and
about the number of people they are talking about, as the Chinese language cannot differentiate between
‘he’ and ‘she’, as can be done in the West (at least not usually in the spoken language), and words are
also unable to be rendered plural.
Success in the civil service exams was the surest route to fame and fortune in Imperial China.
Matteo Ricci arrived during the waning years of the Ming dynasty but rapidly saw that by helping the
sons of China’s elite do well in these exams he would then be able to use this to his advantage in his
attempts to convert them to Christianity (which was, after all, his main goal). He had clearly learned
from his earlier mistake of trying to take a shortcut with his missionary work by dressing up as a
Buddhist monk. Ricci’s mnemonic skills were impressive, even for an age when a good memory was
taken for granted in Europe (even among the poor and uneducated – in a society where the majority
was illiterate, culture was still largely a matter of oral transmission, something that would have honed
mnemonic skills).
Matteo Ricci’s efforts at conversion in China were not successful, but his work has proved a
valuable link between that country and the West, as he transliterated many scientific terms and concepts
into Chinese for the first time. He also made some interesting observations on the Chinese language as
37 Ibid., p. 262.
203
the area known as Xintiandi: xin meaning ‘new’, which is straightforward enough, while tian di is the
snowball: tian, meaning heaven or sky, and di, meaning earth, together make up the word ‘world’ or
‘universe’, which can also signify ‘everything’, hence Xintiandi simply means ‘New World’.
Now it might be useful to take a closer look at the construction of Chinese characters, which are
also variously known as ideographs, ideograms, or sinograms. Basically they consist of little pictures
illustrating sometimes in an almost literal manner. Take the character jia, which denotes ‘house’,
‘home’, and ‘family’ – note that these three notions are not separable in the way that they are in the
West, this can be exemplified by the use of the term in the Zhang Yimou film Shanghai Triad where the
Tang family is referred to as ‘Tang jia’. Jia’s nine strokes actually represent a pig underneath a roof;
the top three strokes representing the roof, while the rest of the character consists of the depiction of
a pig. This is considered a particularly apt symbol for Chinese family life, as a family is often defined
as ‘a related group of people who “eat out of one pot”’38. This can be understood literally, as in a daily
meal (pork is a staple of the Chinese diet), or figuratively by signifying the sharing of income (formerly
earned by the raising of pigs). This means that the family was not only a group that consumed pork, but
was an economic unit in producing this commodity.
This understanding of the family unit as the basic economic component in society resonates
with what Michel Foucault tells us about the Greek state as being made up of households39. He states
that the Greek notion of oeconomy, to be found in Aristotle, designated ‘the typical management of the
family, of its goods and wealth, the management or direction of slaves, of the wife, and of children,
and possibly the management, if you like, of clients’40. Foucault was referring to this in the context of
his examination of the concept of the pastorate, where he felt that the term ‘oeconomy’ (speaking in
French) was the ‘word best suited to translate oikonomia psuchon’, he also noted that it was translated
as regimen animarum in Latin (the government or regimen (regime) of souls)’41. By breaking down
the management of the Greek household Foucault saw it as consisting of the persons who composed it
(including slaves), he then examined what constituted its fewest possible elements, isolating ‘the first
and fewest possible parts of a family’, which he lists as being: master and slave, husband and wife, and
father and children42. There is an interesting similarity here between these three significant relationships
in Greek society and the five human relationships that Confucius has outlined in the Lun Yu (The
Anelects): parent and child; husband and wife; friends; old and young; ruler and subject.
The Chinese have a saying: ‘no discord, no concord’, which indicates that they, like any other
society, reach consensus through a frank airing of views. The main difference from the Western tradition
is that the Chinese have no public arena for doing this. There are no agorae in China; Beijing has never
had an equivalent of the Roman Forum. The Chinese are far less interested in allowing any given indi-
vidual unfettered freedom of expression, seeing the common good as being above any individual’s con-
cerns. This is not to say that they do not have public spaces, of course they do, but their understanding
of the word public is different. The Chinese word gong must be understood as resonating with different
traditional mores than what we understand in the West. Gong is the usual transliteration of the Western
concept of ‘public’ into Chinese; combined with other characters it can result in words such as gongkai
(open, public, overt), gongyuan (a public park), gongyong (public use), and even, oddly, gongji (a roost-
er – perhaps the fertilising of hens used to be regarded as a public function in China?).
See-Chen Chang and Arlen Min Ye tell us that the notion of the ‘public’ had been, to a large
extent, absent in Chinese urban society43. They state that until the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
38 Nancy Jervis, ‘The Meaning of Jia: An Introduction’ from House Home Family: Living and Being Chi-
nese, Ronald G. Knapp and Kai-yin Lo, eds., p. 223.
39 Michel Foucault, Lecture Number Eight (1 March 1978) from Security, Territory, Population: Lectures
at the Collège de France 1977-78, Michel Senellart, ed., p. 217, endnote 2.
40 Ibid., p. 192.
41 Ibid., p. 192-193.
42 Ibid., p. 217, endnote 2.
43 See-Chen Chang & Arlen Min Ye, ‘Modern Urbanism and the Public Realm: City planning in early-
204
centuries, elements in Chinese urban settlements that were perceived as belonging to the public realm
were almost always identified with the notion of the State as opposed to the private weal; it took the
enormous upheavals of the early twentieth century to introduce the notion of a res publica into Chinese
urban life. As we have already seen, traditional concepts of the city in China followed the principles of
cosmological symbolism, where the elements, such as walls and gates, were laid out in accordance with
symbolic requirements, which also determined city shape for the more important settlements. Chang
and Ye see the notion of a public (as an intrinsic part of civic society) as being an important part of pre-
modern Chinese city building or urban life44, they claim, probably correctly, that the establishment of the
notion of the ‘public’ was a necessary step in the modernisation of China.
The Chinese term for public, gong, suffers from being an amalgam of two characters which
renders its meaning somewhat negative, gong is not ‘public’ in the positive sense we understand it in
the West, but denotes ‘non-private’. Negative definitions are never entirely satisfactory, and this one
surely reflects something so profoundly different in the Chinese mentalité about the understanding of
what constitutes public space that its ramifications are only now beginning to be felt in the cities that are
trying to compete as nodes in the global network. In fact, it could probably be stated that even the ap-
plication of the word gong to describe the new public spaces being laid out in cities like Shanghai and
Beijing is not an appropriate use of the term. It might be better to refer to them as chang, that is ‘open
space’.
Chang denotes a site or a field and is the word used in airport (feiji chang), a tennis court (wang
qiuchang), and a stadium (tiyu chang) (at least a stadium that is open-air). This is what designers are
providing in these cities: open-air spaces, not public ones (in the sense of the Western traditional of the
agora). These spaces are like the plaza in front of New York’s Seagram Building (as highlighted by Jane
Jacobs earlier): a place of transition, not a place to linger, certainly not a place to await any brush with
the unexpected. This is probably the single most important point that illustrates the lack of public feeling
in the open-air spaces of China.
Western language
One final note that should be made before closing this chapter on language is to compare the subtle
nuance of Chinese to the precision of English, or French (or Dutch or German for that matter). All of
these non-inflected Indo-European languages are descended from Latin. Michel Foucault has built
linguistic nominalism into his conception of the archaeological method, which, according to David
Couzens Hoy, has created difficulties45. Richard Rorty, Hubert Dreyfus, and Paul Rabinow are cited by
Hoy as seeing the mistake of Foucault’s archaeology as its tendency to treat language as ‘autonomous
and as constitutive of reality’46. This research is not intending to explore semantics, certainly not at this
late stage of its analysis, it is simply enough to point out that words, and the order in which they are
used, do reflect reality. We have seen the seemingly odd clustering effect of the Chinese system of no-
menclature, and the graphic yet nuanced nature of their character-based script; these reflect specific re-
alities, constructed by specific people in specific places.
Gary Gutting thinks that the modern period (i.e. after Immanuel Kant) was one in which ‘the
transparent, purely representative character of language is lost and language becomes once again just
one part of the world’47. Language is no longer some sort of golden key to understanding the world.
Gutting sees Foucault’s formalisation and hermeneutical interpretation as the complementary efforts in
overcoming the obstacles language can pose to knowledge48. And, according to Georges Canguilhem,
twentieth-century Guangzhou, China’ (conference paper delivers at the ISUU 4, in TU Delft, September 2007).
44 Ibid.
45 David Couzens Hoy, ‘Introduction’ from Foucault: A Critical Reader, David Couzens Hoy, ed., p. 2.
46 Ibid., p. 4.
47 The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Gary Gutting, ed., p. 17.
48 Ibid., p. 17.
205
‘[l]anguage is no longer, as it was in the Renaissance, the signature or mark of things. It becomes the
instrument for manipulating, mobilizing, juxtaposing, and comparing things; the organ allowing them
to be composed in a universal tableau of identities and differences; a means not for revealing order, but
for dispensing it’49.
Robert Irwin tells us that the word Renaissance tends to conjure up images of new inventions,
the exploration of uncharted territory, the breaking away from old artistic convention, etc., yet he makes
the important point that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe was a period of close textual
study of old manuscripts; the Renaissance (as a rebirth) was essentially the rediscovery of the literature
of antiquity as well as its humanist culture50. All of this ties in to Michel Foucault’s notion of the
metamorphosis of ancient concepts such as askesis into medieval ones like asceticism, denoting, for all
the superficial differences between them (as methods of the care of the self), a certain degree of cultural
continuity that underpins them.
One of the striking paradoxes in the history of Western culture is the fact that the invention of the
printing press had such an initially archaicizing effect. According to Robert Irwin, neglected medieval
texts were suddenly able to enjoy a much wider circulation than they had ever achieved when first
written51. One of the reasons for this is the fact that as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Latin was still very much a living language. Not only was it the language of scholarly discourse, but it
was also used by poets and playwrights; children even used it in their playground games52.
Many important texts, even as late as the seventeenth century, were first published in Latin:
Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum of 1620, William Harvey’s De motu cordis of 1628, and Isaac
Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica which appeared in 1687. Not only was English
considered an unsuitable vehicle for the discussion of serious scholarly matters (as was also the case
with the other European languages), but even grammars and dictionaries of English were routinely
produced in Latin and their authors found themselves in the rather odd position of struggling to make an
English grammar fit a Latin model. Robert Irwin cites Thomas Smith’s De Recta et Emendata Linguae
Anglicae Scriptione Dialogus (1568), Alexander Gil’s Logonomia Anglica (1619), and John Wallis’s
Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1653) to illustrate this point.
This is probably not unrelated to the Church’s opposition to the translating of the Bible into the
vernacular (note that even though the Bible was of course written in Hebrew and Greek, the liturgy of
the Mass was in Latin). To an uneducated congregation, the glory and grandeur of that ancient language
must have seemed a mysterious and wonderful thing; truly a fitting vehicle for the celebration of the
most sacred of divine mysteries. Can it be an accident that at the supreme moment of the Roman
Catholic Mass, when the host is elevated (and the miracle of transubstantiation is taking place), the
priest solemnly intones the immortal phrase: ‘Hoc est corpus meum’53, to an illiterate congregation, who
might want to make their own use of these noble works outside of the church when wanting to indicate
something magical, should try to repeat it and thereby invoke its power? (Though the phrase ‘hocus
pocus’ does seem to lack somewhat the majesty of the original.)
Latin has an economy and elegance of expression not easily matched by its linguistic
descendants. It has a concision, and a clarity, that is quite remarkable. As a result Latin is still used today
in academic writing and legal work, succinct expressions such as quod erat demonstrandum and res ipsa
locator express themselves more precisely that any attempt to render them into English could ever hope
to do, hence it is hardly any wonder that works of philosophy and science were, until relatively recently,
still published in that tongue. It is also interesting that popular works originally written in the vernacular,
such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Cervantes’s Don Quixote, only enjoyed a wider readership after
49 Georges Canguilhem, ‘The Death of Man, or the Exhaustion of the Cogito?’ from The Cambridge
Companion to Foucault, Gary Gutting, ed., pp. 79-80.
50 Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, p. 54.
51 Ibid., p. 71.
52 Ibid., p. 83.
53 Trans: This is my body.
206
they had been translated into Latin. This was of course the period when scholars knew that they could
only be assured a wider readership if they published in Latin (as opposed to Dutch or German), in fact
they may well never reach an audience unless they did so. John Milton thought long and hard before
deciding to forego Latin for his magnificent Paradise Lost (and those of us more comfortable in English
may be grateful to him for doing so).
Latin has also set the tone for subsequent Western linguistic expression; tempered by Greek, it
has allowed us to communicate ideas of great subtlety but with precision. So successful has it been that
we, as Westerners, have been able to impose our way of looking at the world on the rest of it. However,
we must never underestimate the ability a language indigenous to an area has for capturing nuance that
may not even be visible to a mind formed elsewhere. This is why this thesis has gone to such lengths
to highlight certain key Chinese terms, such as jia and gong, in order to ascertain what is wrong with
Shanghai’s new public spaces.
207
3 CULTURE AND PERCEPTION: SHANGHAI IN FILM AND LITERATURE
This final chapter examines representations of Shanghai in film and literature, paying particular atten-
tion to the novel When We Were Orphans by Anglo-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Set largely in the
Shanghai of the 1930s, this book examines many of the themes that seem to feature in recent representa-
tions of the city, particularly nostalgia. Nostalgia is something we shall also be seeing in Zhang Yimou’s
film Shanghai Triad, which M. Christine Boyer analyses in the book Shanghai Reflections. Edited by
Mario Gandalsonas, this book also contains an essay by Ackbar Abbas and explores the relationship
between preservation and development in the process of modernisation, questioning the use of nostalgia
as one of the forms through which the relationship between the past and the present acquires presence
in the physical and cultural context of Shanghai. Some other films which also touch on these themes
are The White Countess, whose screenplay was also written by Kazuo Ishiguro, as well as the recent
adaptations of Eileen Chang’s novella Lust, Caution. The most recent film adaptation of W. Somerset
Maugham’s The Painted Veil has also moved its story from Hong Kong to Shanghai, presumably to cash
in on Shanghai’s burgeoning cachet among international cinema-goers.
Shanghai in film
Shanghai is aiming for global greatness, seeing it included as one of the glamorous destinations in an
action film like Mission: Impossible III places it alongside Berlin and Rome as the scene for fast-paced
adventure, but actually the city here is nothing more than a backdrop; we catch the occasional glimpse
of the skyscrapers of Pudong, and we are shown a map of the Suzhou River in a sequence where Tom
Cruise, as Ethan Hawke, is running to intercept a villain. The map may show the Suzhou River but
Cruise’s character is actually seen running through Zhou Zuang, a city two-hours’ drive from Shanghai.
While this may seem a trifling point, and people who go to see something called Mission: Impossible do
not necessarily expect a high degree of verisimilitude, including the skyscrapers of Shanghai in a film
such as this means they can now be seen as having made it to the big time, Shanghai, as a global city, is
now worthy of inclusion in an international blockbuster; however it is enough merely to be included –
juxtaposing it with images of Zhuang Zhou, a city with an entirely different character, undermines any
attempt at a realistic portrayal of the city, something that would surely not be accepted if it were New
York or London.
Mario Gandalsonas has presciently pointed out the futility of the attempts of China’s
Cultural Revolution to erase the country’s past, he sees this as underpinning the relationship between
preservation and development in a city like Shanghai as it modernises. Perhaps the Revolution’s
failure stemmed from the fact that in China, unlike, for example, the United States, there is so much
more history to deal with? Gandalsonas see Ackbar Abbas’s questioning of ‘where do we invest?’ or
‘how do we rule?’ as masking the even deeper question of ‘what will we remember?’1. He also points
out that memories are selective in Shanghai, but this is hardly unique to Shanghai: memories are
selective everywhere. However, it is what Gandalsonas calls Shanghai’s ‘multifarious past and complex
colonial history’ that is presenting a unique set of problems today, especially with regard to the question
of urban preservation. The preservation of the past in Shanghai, as a sort of symbolic capital, has,
according to Gandalsonas, allowed the establishment of cultural differences that were previously
blurred by colonisation, as a result, the question of nostalgia has become one of the forms through
which this relationship between the past and the present is acquiring a presence within the physical and
cultural context of the city today.
Ackbar Abbas sees preservation in Shanghai as being motivated by something quite
different from cultural heritage, which given the city’s quasi-colonial past, has always been somewhat
2 Ackbar Abbas, ‘Play It Again Shanghai: Urban Preservation in the Global Era’ from Shanghai Reflec-
tions, Mario Gandalsonas, ed., p. 38.
3 Ibid., p. 38.
4 Ibid., p. 41.
5 Ibid., p. 42.
6 Ibid., p. 41.
7 Ibid., p. 42.
8 Ibid., p. 49.
9 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 14.
10 Ibid., p. 14.
209
nostalgia. Nostalgia, as Abbas so eloquently puts it, ‘is not the return of past memory: it is the return of
memory to the past’11.
It is also nostalgia that permeates so many of the films set in Shanghai, from The White Count-
ess, where the plight of White Russians, rendered stateless after the Bolshevik Revolution, is shown.
We see them eking out an existence after fleeing to the only city in the world that did not require a visa
to enter. We see nostalgia in The Painted Veil, where W. Somerset Maugham’s trademark plot of marital
infidelity has moved its location from the Hong Kong of the book to Shanghai for the film adaptation
(the fourth such adaptation). Perhaps this was done because Hong Kong has now become too accessible
for those in the West who want to see a film set in China; Shanghai, at least, is still the Orient as it once
was, the Orient, dare we say it, veiled in mystery.
And then we have Ang Lee’s film version of the Eileen Chang story Lust, Caution, showing en
era not often seen, that of Shanghai (and Hong Kong) in the 1940s, when both cities were under Japa-
nese occupation. Full of period detail, like the Chinese having to salute the Japanese guards, and West-
erners in Shanghai having to wear armbands indicating their nationality, but the film also contains some
anachronisms, like the continued use of the rickshaw, which was banned by the Japanese on the grounds
that they were demeaning (ironic, of course, as it had been invented in Japan). Eileen Chang has long
been a popular writer with the Chinese, perhaps this is why it took a Chinese (or at lease a Taiwanese)
director to adapt her story. Chang’s relative lack of appeal to a Western readership might stem from her
portrayal of a peculiarly Chinese world, an upper-class one it may be, but it is a very alien one nonethe-
less, and one in which most Westerners probably do not feel comfortable (servants in Chang’s stories
tend to get slapped a lot).
Ang Lee’s portrayal of the film’s sex scenes, which at first glance may seem gratuitous, are in
fact brilliantly daring as they underscore not only the lustful nature of the relationship between Wang
Chia-chih and Mr Yee, the man she seeks to trap (and kill), but it develops into a power relationship
so complex, so profound, and, ultimately, so beautiful that she ends up sacrificing everything to save
him. (No doubt this would have been a relationship that might have piqued Michel Foucault’s curiosity,
however there is no space to explore such an enticing idea here.) The fact that Mr Yee is, as the cliché
has it, old enough to be her father, is also explained obliquely by the subtle references earlier in the
film to Chia-chih’s thwarted relationship with her own father, a man we see only in photographs. The
most poignant moment in the film comes when, surrounded by Japanese soldiers and their geisha in a
Japanese-style inn, Chia-chih sings The Wandering Songstress to her lover. A classic Chinese love song,
the pathos and poignancy of which is further enhanced by the evidence of the surrounding Japanese oc-
cupation. Interestingly, this is also the song that Bijou sings in Shanghai Triad to communicate to her
lover Song. Mistress of the Tang triad boss, Bijou uses this song as a secret signal to her lover, one of
the boss’s paeans. The characters in Shanghai Triad tend to refer to the song by its nickname Moonlight,
which has other resonances in Chinese culture, which we will see in a moment, but the song itself re-
mains simply a more lushly orchestrated version of this popular classic.
Most of these films make use of the real Shanghai as a location to conjure up a world that no
longer exists, yet is this geographical verisimilitude any more real than films that were actually made in
the era? Take Thank You, Mr Moto, a film that has all the usual ingredients: the seedy nightclub (includ-
ing the figure who was to become de rigueur in subsequent portrayals of this era: the nightclub singer),
it also has illegal gambling dens, smuggling (albeit of jewels not drugs), Russian doormen, guns, gang-
sters. Yet apart from some stock footage of the Bund, this film consists entirely of scenes filmed in the
Hollywood studios of Twentieth-Century Fox. Yet in temporal terms it achieves a degree of verisimili-
tude that can never be matched by any current film. So which of them is more real? Is any of them? Or
are they all merely a sort of shadow play? What is interesting is that even as long ago as the 1930s the
same old tropes had begun to crop up, that and the fact that it was the skyline of the Bund that enabled a
director to immediately situate their story: as a set piece, Shanghai needed no other introduction.
11 Ibid., p. 83.
210
It is the Bund that is shown in the opening credits of The Painted Veil, and it is the Bund that
is used as the opening scene for Shanghai Triad, after the boy Shuisheng has arrived by boat to be met
by his gangster uncle. M. Christine Boyer points out that as the boy’s head moves from right to left
his eyes sweep the port, but he does this from a stationary point of view, we as an audience are denied
the more usual panoramic or aerial shot of the cityscape that usually sets the scene, what we get here
is a painted backdrop seen across a river. When his uncle arrives to collect him, Shuisheng then spends
the next few minutes gazing out from under the tarpaulin in the back of his uncle’s lorry as it moves
through the city. Again we see only the boy’s eyes as he stares at the off-screen city, his face coloured
by its lights. Boyer sees these opening scenes as signalling to the viewer the fact that this film is going
to be about the reflected image. Her highly detailed analysis of the film’s scenes highlights the dexterity
with which the device of reflection is used, and not just reflection, even in a scene ablaze with light (as
in the exterior of the triad boss’s house, or in the house’s corridors swathed in golden tones), the light
emanates from interiors and not from the city itself.
As Boyer accurately points out, direct views of the city are blocked out. This she sees as a signal
to the film’s viewer that ‘…something has to be renegotiated: whether it is the relationship of the present
to the past, or of the East and the West’12. Boyer states that ‘[w]hatever it is about the past that fascinates
the gaze, it cannot be approached directly’13. According to Boyer, Zhang Yimou has taken the glamorous
nightlife of 1930’s Shanghai and flattened it. Far from being a seductive, dazzling swirl of fascinating
and ever-changing images, the scenes are mere tableaux. No shot of Shanghai is intended to directly lure
or entrap the gaze, the nostalgic longing for modern Shanghai is retrospective. By presenting modern
Shanghai as an image or object to be looked at, Boyer sees the spectator caught in a trap, and it is Zhang
Yimou’s efforts to deflect this trap that makes him invert this gaze14.
M. Christine Boyer began her analysis of this film with the very same question that began this
thesis’s own work on Shanghai: ‘Can Shanghai regain its status as one of the great metropolises of
the world with a new cosmopolitan spirit open to the West?’15. Boyer’s insightful analysis of Zhang
Yimou’s Shanghai Triad sees the director as placing his struggle between freedom of expression and
authoritarian control at the heart of China’s dilemma in the twenty-first century16. Zhang Yimou found
that historic-themed films tended to be censored less, so he blended the problems of 1990’s China with
his version of 1930’s Shanghai. Boyer’s contention that Zhang Yimou’s portrayal is ‘all about the gaze,
that knowing the past can only be understood as a kind of mirroring’17 is very important for any attempt
to understand what is going in older parts of the city today, particularly the redevelopment mentality that
underpins overtly nostalgic gentrification projects such as Xintiandi.
Shanghai in literature
Ackbar Abbas laments the fact that Hong Kong’s writing, whether it is Jan Morris’s magnificent history
of the colony or the sizzling novels of James Clavell (Taipan, Noble House) and Richard Mason (The
World of Suzie Wong), all fail to address the ordinary everyday life of the city. Shanghai at least has
the novels of Wang Anyi, which, as we saw in Part I, do take what Abbas sees as a risk in addressing
the everyday. Of course the would-be bestseller tends to prefer portraying the lives of the rich and
glamorous (not to mention devious); more serious novelists tends to eschew these sorts of tropes,
preferring to concentrate on a ruthless laying bare of the human condition, sometimes at its most basic.
Their portrayals analyse lives stripped of any extraneous distractions (like money or culture). One of the
12 M. Christine Boyer, ‘Approaching the Memory of Shanghai: The Case of Zhang Yimou and “Shanghai
Triad” (1995)’ from Shanghai Reflections, Mario Gandalsonas, ed., p. 69.
13 Ibid., p. 69.
14 Ibid., p. 69.
15 Ibid., p. 59.
16 Ibid., p. 83.
17 Ibid., p. 76.
211
twentieth century’s most celebrated novels deals precisely with the everyday, the events of 16 June 1904
are graphically portrayed in James Joyce’s Ulysses, where the wandering Jewish advertising canvasser
Leopold Bloom becomes a flâneur in Ireland’s capital city. While Abbas allows that some of the writing
that Hong Kong has produced has been good, he sees ‘the great Hong Kong novel’ as yet to be written18.
He is probably right.
Leo Ou-fan Lee sees the fact that China was victimised but never fully colonised by the Western
powers as resulting in a hybrid of colonial and Chinese elements in Shanghai’s literature. He likens this
to Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘mimicry’, where ‘colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable
Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite . . . a desire that, through
the repetition of partial presence . . . articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial, and historical
difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority’19. Lee sees the situation in a place
like Shanghai, where the colonialism ‘was not a total system governing the entire nation’, as being even
more complicated than any outlined by Bhabha. Lee thinks it possible to descry a species of Bhabha’s
‘mimic men’ among the compradorial and commercial elite who had close personal and business
relations with the Westerners. Because of their desire for total Westernisation these people could have
made willing colonial subjects even as they still remained Chinese citizens20. Lee makes the interesting
point that the world of financial capitalism that these people inhabited is ‘qualitatively different from
the field of cultural production and consumption in literature’, and it is one ‘in which such a “colonized”
species is not well represented’. Lee thinks that this is the case because, despite being familiar with
foreign literature, Chinese writers were not obliged to use it in their own writing21.
One Chinese writer who was at home in both Chinese and English was Eileen Chang. Lee tells
us that Chang always portrayed herself as a Shanghai ‘petty urbanite’ (xiao shimin), and that during the
first half of her life, aside from a two-year stint in Tianjin and a three-year stay in Hong Kong, Chang
lived in Shanghai. The everyday world of Chang’s literature occurs in one of two settings: the typical
alleyway house, or the Western-style house or apartment (the latter being generally quite rundown). Lee
cites the novel Bansheng yuan (Destined for Half a Lifetime) in which one of its heroines lives in an
alleyway house, where, according to Lee, the atmosphere is ‘warm and familiar’22. By contrast, Western-
style houses or apartment buildings are often the site of estrangement or disturbance. In Xinjing (Sutra
of the Heart) a daughter’s obsession with her father is portrayed against a backdrop of a Western-style
apartment building, complete with roof garden, rooms accessed by glass doors, and a lift. According to
Lee, these details accentuate the characters’ psychological tensions, (of course Chang was famously kept
a virtual prisoner by her father in their Western-style home in Shanghai when she was young). It also
might be because Chang never lived for any length of time in an alleyway house that her view of them
tends to be somewhat rosy.
The tone Chang adopts – her literary style – was very much influenced by her reading of English
authors such as W. Somerset Maugham, P.G. Wodehouse, and Aldous Huxley, which may also explain
the elegant yet somewhat world-weary nature of her astonishingly assured style (she was a very young
writer when she had her first success). Shanghai in the 1940s was a city that still celebrated its writers,
and Chang managed to pursue her craft by pulling off a dangerous balancing act, she managed to write
just enough to accurately portray the life of the city without ever falling foul of the Japanese authorities
who had occupied it (in December 1941). It must be noted however that Chang wrote exclusively in
Chinese until the 1950s (apart from a prize-winning essay in English as a schoolgirl), her Chinese
stories are all now available in translation and make for interesting if not wholly delightful reading.
Love in a Fallen City was the fourth story Chang set in Hong Kong, and was written shortly
after her return to Shanghai from there in 1942. Leo Ou-fan Lee sees a ‘self-reflexive linkage’ in her
18 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, p. 145.
19 Homi K. Bhabha quoted in Leo Ou-fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern, p. 309.
20 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, p. 310.
21 Ibid., p. 310.
22 Ibid., p. 272.
212
exoticisation of Hong Kong, which, like a mirror, reflects back her own city. Lee points out Chang’s
almost uncanny prescience in linking these two cities, because for Chang, Hong Kong will always be
hopelessly colonial, whereas Shanghai, despite all its foreignness, is still Chinese23. One interesting link
to M. Christine Boyer’s analysis of Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad is the fact that the mirror, along
with moonlight (as in the nickname for the song The Wandering Songstress), also feature prominently
in Chang’s work. Karen S. Kingsbury sees Chang’s stories as ‘a succession of echoes, or the infinite
series produced by a three-way mirror, recalling and restoring an ancient, anterior sense of selfhood
in the midst of modernist, wartime rupture and dislocation’24. Kingsbury quotes the line ‘Moonlight in
front of my bed’, which is the first line from a celebrated poem by Li Po, and one that would have been
familiar to every schoolchild in China25. It might be nice to leave the last word on this topic to Eileen
Chang herself who described the China in her books as the ‘China as Westerners imagine it: exquisite,
illogical, very entertaining’26.
23 Ibid., p. 328.
24 Karen S. Kingsbury, ‘Introduction’, Love in a Fallen City (by Eileen Chang), p. xvii.
25 Ibid., p321 (endnote from ‘Red Rose, White Rose’, p. 255).
26 Eileen Chang, ‘Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier’, Love in a Fallen City, p. 8.
27 W. Somerset Maugham, ‘The Outstation’, The Round Dozen, p. 103.
213
ing adherence to their own traditions in the face of conditions that appear to render them almost absurd
is at once their undoing (in the case of Warburton’s protégée) and their greatest strength. And it is this
absurd rigidity that is sometimes regarded with admiration by the people they colonised, certainly it was
often emulated, and in turn highlighted to great comic effect by the novels of E.M. Forster, W. Somerset
Maugham, et al.
Commentators like Edward W. Said, David Harvey, Marshall Berman, et al., often make use
of writers to make their points, invariably preferring the great artists like Joseph Conrad, James Joyce,
Marcel Proust, or Rudyard Kipling. But sometimes lesser artists can have useful things to say. An ob-
servant novelist can often reveal more about a period than the most diligent historian when it comes
to what life was actually like. And all those incidental little details of daily life that get mentioned in
passing can give such insight into life as it was lived at the time of writing. W. Somerset Maugham’s
descriptions of colonial life in British Malaya have an unrivalled ability to bring that vanished world to
life. This he does through his well-drawn characters, and accurately observed settings. Sometimes it can
pay to lower the bar a little.
The crime novel, which began to develop in the broadsheet and in mass-circulation literature,
assumed an apparently opposite role. Above all, its function was to show that the delinquent be-
longed to an entirely different world, unrelated to familiar, everyday life. This strangeness was
first that of the lower depths of society (Les Mysteres de Paris, Rocambole), then that of mad-
ness (especially in the latter half of the century) and lastly that of crime in high society (Arsene
Lupin)29.
It is this last stage of the crime novel, the high-society stage, that had its finest flowering in the
1920s and ’30s. Richard Sennett is also interested in the rise of this literary genre in the nineteenth cen-
tury, seeing it as a link to the changes inherent in the way people interacted in public, at least in cities
like London and Paris, where the individual was no longer approachable by a stranger, and where cloth-
ing also acted as a sort of shield to mask the individual’s identity, therefore forcing every man and wom-
an into being a detective if they wanted to make sense of the street30. Sennett also quite presciently high-
lights the differences in the mode of detecting between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the likes of Honore
de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, or William Makepeace Thackery. Sennett points out that the ‘science of
reading character from appearances in these [latter] “serious writers” was everywhere tinged with the
portrayal of anxiety in the acts of reading; it was not delightful, as Conan Doyle made it seem’31. Detec-
tives we had all become, but whereas in daily life, if our detecting of our fellow citizens went awry it
could lead to ‘blunders, insults, or the loss of favor’32, in the murder mystery the detectives had to be
reassuringly infallible, not to mention entertaining.
One of the earliest writers of detective fiction was the very serious author and poet, Edgar Al-
lan Poe. Jorge Luis Borges saw Poe’s tales of fantastic horror as being ‘perfect’ and notes that even
though Poe actually invented the detective story, and wrote fantastic tales of the supernatural, he never
combined the two. G.K. Chesterton, however, did, his Father Brown stories always manage to explain,
in reason’s name, a fact that was seemingly inexplicable33. Edgar Allan Poe not only single-handedly
invented the detective genre, but he also established some of its most enduring features: the irascibly
brilliant detective in Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin; the affable but less than razor-witted side-kick, in the
case of The Murders in the Rue Morgue the unnamed narrator who recounts the tale – another classic
trope of the genre (Dr Watson, Captain Hastings, et al.); and in that same seminal story we get another
classic situation: the locked-room puzzle.
In Poe’s story an elderly mother and her daughter are brutally attacked in their Paris apartment,
the only access to which is by a door, which is locked from the inside. M. Dupin solves this puzzle by
determining that an escaped orang-utan had managed to climb in through on open window, startling the
inhabitants, whose screams then so unnerve the poor beast that he lashed out, inadvertently killing them
before making good his escape through said open window, which then closed by its own weight after-
wards, leaving the apartment seemingly locked from the inside. A cunning plot, unfortunately what Poe
failed to realise, most likely because he was an American and not French, was that his solution was de-
monstrably false. As W. Somerset Maugham suavely points out (and Maugham would know, as he was
born in France), no Frenchwoman of ‘a certain age’ would ever have left a window open to the noxious
night airs34. However, Somerset Maugham’s debunking aside, the locked-room puzzle went on to prove
an immensely popular sub-genre in detective fiction.
35 Ibid., p.19.
36 Ibid., p.110.
216
the brink of ruin, a place whose days were numbered, because between 1937, when the Japanese took
over the Chinese-administered parts of the city (leaving the foreign concession as ‘the lonely island’ we
saw in Part II), and 1941, when they took over the rest of the city, it gives a certain urgency to the nar-
rative, an urgency which only highlights the contrasting fecklessness of the colonial inhabitants who
fritter away their time in nightclubs and gambling dens. This tone becomes increasingly breathless and
confused when Banks is wandering through the labyrinth of the warren: the alleyway houses of Chapei,
now being reduced to empty shells thanks to Japanese bombardment. Banks ends up in this part of the
city unwittingly, in fact he does not even realise that he has passed beyond the safety of the foreign con-
cessions (and into the war zone) until it is too late. Pursuing the chimera of his parents’ hiding place he
pushes ever deeper into the warren, and danger.
Here the author’s meticulously observed geography becomes nebulous, but it gives Banks, and
the reader, a chance to take stock of the warren, a place where foreigners rarely come, unless they are
missionaries, or communists. Banks finds it hard to believe that human beings can live like this, it looks
to him like an ants’ nest. The houses, intended for the poorest inhabitants of the city, have tiny rooms,
and sit back to back, row after row. Looking carefully from his vantage point on top of an abandoned
police station, Banks is able to make out the many laneways, the ‘[l]ittle alleys just wide enough to al-
low the people to get into their homes. At the back, the houses have no windows at all. The rear rooms
are black holes, backing on to the houses behind’37, a good description reminiscent of the siheyuen-
based alleyway house, with their blank northern walls.
After being rescued from the nightmare of the warren Christopher Banks finds himself once
again in ‘civilised’ Shanghai. The business of his parents’ disappearance is explained in a suitably detec-
tive-like denouement by his ‘Uncle’ Philip. As incidents, these two events were unrelated, and both had
more to do with sex than drugs. Banks’s father had run away with his mistress, while his mother was
kidnapped into the harem of a Chinese warlord. The notion of a spirited upper-class Englishwomen be-
ing forced into this sort of bondage strikes an almost comically lurid note at the end of the book, (at least
it would if it were not so sad). Added to this is the shocking revelation that gentle ‘Uncle’ Philip was the
one who had orchestrated this shameful state of affairs (out of his thwarted desire for her). The irony of
all of this is that the money that has enabled Banks to live the life of a gentleman has been provided by
this Chinese warlord, yet another unsettling discovery that turns the hero’s world upside down.
Banks, and his ward Jennifer, do achieve a sort of peace at the end of the novel, they eventually
track down his mother, who is living out her old age in a convent in Hong Kong. Having been rescued
after the war she was moved there, but sadly her mind is gone. Once Banks sees that she is well cared
for, and seems contented enough, he too can rest. An old man now, he has finally achieved his life’s am-
bition, however it is a distinctly bittersweet achievement. Hong Kong features in the novel as a distant
echo of the Shanghai he once knew, first as a child, and then again as an adult at the height of his pow-
ers. Jennifer’s suggestion of a trip to Shanghai at the end of the book, while difficult at that time, would
not have been impossible, is turned down. They both decide to leave things as they are, perhaps wisely.
Banks’s last trip to the city had been full of unpleasant surprises, no matter how cathartic. At least here
in Hong Kong he has achieved a sort of closure.
The Shanghai of When We Were Orphans is portrayed in an overwhelmingly negative light, this
is probably because Kazuo Ishiguro knew that he was portraying a society experiencing its death throes.
A way of life was ending, one whose decadence and fecklessness had led it to this sorry pass. Chris-
topher Banks, the celebrated detective, did find what he was looking for, but like so many who do, he
must have wondered if it might not have better had he not done so. The most important lesson that can
be drawn from a novel like When We Were Orphans is the danger inherent in nostalgia. The past is the
past, it forms us into the people we are today, but it does not necessarily benefit us to go back and rake it
over, indeed it may well be damaging, as Christopher Banks found to his cost. If there is one lesson that
can learned from this novel, it is the same as we have also seen with M. Christine Boyer’s analysis of
218
Conclusion to Part IV
Part IV dealt with China and culture, beginning with a brief overview of the history of China in an at-
tempt to understand what was termed the Chinese mentalité. China’s early development led it into
a high-level equilibrium trap, which was further strengthened by the country’s remarkable cultural
cohesion. Western perceptions of China turned from the chinoiserie of the eighteenth century to the
‘Yellow Peril’ of the nineteenth. One interesting point discovered from this reading of China’s long
history is that there has never been a tradition of public dissent here, as in the West. The Chinese tradi-
tion is to reach consensus through the frank exchange of views, yet they have no public arena for doing
this. The Chinese also tend to see the common good as being above any individual’s concerns, and while
they do have public spaces, their understanding of the word public, as gong, is not the same as in the
West. The term chang, or open space, would probably be a better choice for describing the new public
spaces in China’s cities.
Part IV also showed the scope the Chinese language has for subtlety and nuance, especially
when compared to Western languages, and it was this study of Chinese that gave the insight into the ap-
parent illogicality of Jorge Luis Borges’s Chinese encyclopaedia, rendering it as just another example of
the Chinese practice of clustering meaning that is to be found in any Chinese dictionary today. We also
saw how Chinese buildings are invariably laid out in accordance with the precepts of feng shui, and how
the courtyard house typology, the siheyuan, was flexible enough to enable families to expand or reduce
in size. The hierarchical system of ‘graduated privacy’ that developed in this typology was what enabled
the dense mesh of Beijing’s hutong to come into being and eventually experienced its subtlest flowering
in the alleyway houses of Shanghai.
The last chapter of this thesis examined Shanghai’s portrayal in film and literature, with
M. Christine Boyer analysis of Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad highlighting the use being made of
nostalgia. Boyer’s commentary began with the question we referred to at the beginning of this thesis:
namely ‘Can Shanghai regain its status as one of the great metropolises of the world with a new
cosmopolitan spirit open to the West?’ Boyer sees Zhang Yimou’s film as being ‘all about the gaze,
that knowing the past can only be understood as a kind of mirroring’, and she thinks that it is important
because it attempts to understand what is going on in the older parts of the city; something that has
important ramifications for gentrification projects such as Xintiandi, which also make use of nostalgia.
We also saw Ackbar Abbas lament the fact that Hong Kong’s writing tends to ignore the
everyday. Eileen Chang, a writer usually more associated with Shanghai than Hong Kong, did make use
of the everyday in her stories, where portrayals of alleyway-house life were warm, while Western-style
homes tended to be tense, reflecting her own personal experience. Attention was also drawn to the im-
portance of dress in the cultural construction of perception, pointing out Matteo Ricci’s error in dress-
ing like a monk to try and gain Chinese acceptance at the end of the Ming era; not the sort of mistake a
British colonial official would make, something beautifully illustrated by W. Somerset Maugham’s short
story ‘The Outstation’. Finally, Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans was examined, which also
contained a warning against nostalgia.
219
CONCLUSION
What is not harmful to the city cannot harm the citizen. In every fancied case of harm, apply the rule:
‘If the city is not harmed, I am not harmed either.’ But if the city should indeed be harmed, never rage at
the culprit: rather, find out at what point his vision failed him.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Five, 22.
Jane Jacobs tells us that writing, printing, and the Internet can give a false sense of security about the
permanence of culture1. Cultures can be lost, not just by invasion, which is obvious, but by the fact that
the way we do things at a given moment is constantly undergoing evolution. Cultures, in other words,
are constructed. Manuel Castells sees the real issue, however, as in how they are constructed, and from
what, and by whom, and for what. Castells sees the construction of identities as using materials from
history, geography, biology, productive and reproductive institutions, as well as from collective memory
and personal fantasies, and even from power apparatuses and religious revelation. According to Castells,
‘individuals, social groups, and societies process all these materials, and rearrange their meaning,
according to social determinations and cultural projects that are rooted in their social structure, and
in their space/time framework’2.
This attempt to glimpse the Chinese mentalité has been, I feel, a useful exercise in that it helped
me come to terms with what is happening in the city of Shanghai today. We in the West are going to
have to do more than merely glimpse what is happening in China if we are going to better understand
what will undoubtedly be one of the world’s most important countries in the twenty-first century. So, to
go back to the question I posed at the very beginning of this thesis: can Shanghai become a global city?
The answer is no, at least in the short term. We have seen what Shanghai needs to do if it wants
to take its place in the front rank of global cities (in the way that Hong Kong and Singapore have done).
In my exploration of what has been happening in Shanghai, especially to its public spaces (old and
new), I began with a hunch that Michel Foucault’s theories of power relations, and how they are in-
scribed in the built environment, was going to be useful. It was. The theory that the alleyway house is a
benign panopticon is, I think, clear, it also reinforces my contention that we should be wary of the nos-
talgic habit of keeping empty shells of buildings in places like Xintiandi simply because they happen to
be pretty. We should really be trying to salvage the way of life that once inhabited them. Cities are, after
all, not merely about buildings and streets, they are about people, and their networks of interaction. Any
study of a city must take account of the warm life of its inhabitants and not allow itself to be blinded by
the glittering geometries of stone.
As for my examination of Shanghai’s new public spaces, and what has gone wrong with them,
the answer came from my study of the Chinese language itself. Initially this was undertaken as a way
of enabling me to ask for directions, or instruct a taxi driver, I soon found out, however, that the in-
sight it gave me into the people of China, and their culture, was invaluable. Others, of course, have also
learned Chinese, but they often do so within the confines of their own academic disciplines: linguistics,
literature, history, etc. To learn Chinese in order to study the urban environment of a city like Shanghai
opened up hitherto unforeseen possibilities.
The theory that the Western term ‘public’ would be better off transliterated as chang instead of
gong, especially for describing the new public spaces of Shanghai, is perhaps the most important point
I can make in this entire thesis. The windswept plazas of high modernism, whether in the East or the
West, are not places to linger, they are certainly not places to await a brush with the unexpected. While
under the influence of postmodernism, for all its witty references to a classical past, public space has
degenerated into a sort of open-air shopping mall, and sadly it is this model that has been followed so
The definition of ‘the West’ is an important consideration in this thesis, particularly Part III’s exami-
nation of Edward W. Said’s positing of an European construction of the Oriental ‘Other’. Said has
frequently been attacked for his definition of this Orient. A notion such as ‘the West’ is every bit as
problematic as that of ‘the Orient’. Suffice to say that the West is understood to mean Western Europe
(including Scandinavia and Iceland), North America, Russia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. This
map corresponds with those countries commonly displayed on the walls of doctors who specialise in
tropical medicine as being places with the lowest risk of infection from malaria (also a useful index of a
country’s relative development).
Russia
When examining the history of most of the twentieth century Russia can safely be omitted from the
West. As the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics it was the lynchpin of what was known as the ‘Second
World’. Likewise, any examination of world history before 1905 would have to exclude Japan from this
group. The rest of the countries that have been outlined correspond roughly to John Darwin’s ‘northern
super-block’, the two that have been highlighted as having either arrived later, or falling away for a
time, will now briefly be looked at.
According to John Darwin, Russia, from about 1700, and certainly after 1762, was one of the
five or six great powers that decided the fate of Europe. It became, after Britain, the second greatest
imperial power in Asia, and a coloniser on a massive scale. It embarked on a civilising mission every bit
as strong as Britain’s and France’s. Peter the Great, whom we have seen earlier in Jane Jacobs’s work,
was keen for Russia to become more Western. After his European tour in 1698 Tsar Peter imposed a
ban on beards and personally cut off those of the leading boyars (nobles) who failed to comply; the
traditional Russian kaftan was also outlawed, with what Darwin refers to as ‘German dress’ being
imposed in its place1. John Darwin sees Russia as not only shaping Europe’s domination (of Eurasia),
but also subverting the continent’s would-be supremacy at crucial moments and in crucial ways.
Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese in 1905 could be considered one of these moments, with
the blow to the prestige that Westerners suffered as a result of the influx to White Russians to East Asia,
particularly Shanghai, after the Bolshevik Revolution another. However, Darwin has resolutely pointed
out that not even the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War could break Russia’s expansion into North-East
Asia.
Russia, as we have just seen, ceased to be a member of the West after the Communist takeover in
1917, it was certainly perceived as being the enemy of the ‘free-thinking’ Western democracies during
the Cold War. But when in November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down the pro-Soviet governments of
Eastern Europe all rapidly collapsed, Russia’s buffers against the West vanished virtually overnight.
The Treaty of Alma Ata in December 1991 dissolved the Soviet Union into fifteen new states, and
acknowledged the end of what Darwin calls ‘the Soviet raj’ in the Baltic, the Trans-Caucasus, and
Central Asia2. Perhaps most damaging of all, the Ukraine voted for full independence. As a political
entity the Ukraine had been a sort of combination of Ireland and India for the Russian Empire, what
Darwin calls the ‘vital auxiliary of Russian imperial power since the 1650s’ was finally gone3.
The basic failing of the Soviet system was economic: it simply could not compete with the West.
A vast imperial structure, the power in Northern Eurasia, and the West’s sworn enemy – from Vietnam,
to Cuba, and with fifth columnists everywhere – simply ceased to exist. By 1991 its empire lay in ruins.
Post-Soviet Russia remains, however, a huge domain, but one, as Darwin rightly points out, with a
crippled economy and a spectre of growing American influence in Inner Eurasia – prospects that would
Japan
Japan was imperialism’s odd man out, in that it was an Asian power. It had enjoyed treaty port
concessions in China since 1895, and from 1932 increasingly came to dominate as the main foreign
power in China. Japan was not the only non-Caucasian imperial power at the outbreak of World War
I, there was still the Ottoman Empire, but this was perceived as ‘the sick man of Europe’. Japan, by
contrast, was a burgeoning power, and her humiliating defeat of Russia in 1905 marked her as a force
to be reckoned with. Niall Ferguson has noted that Japan as a nation actually has a surprising amount
in common with Britain: both are formed of archipelagos of islands just off a continent with a well-
developed and longer-established civilisation, both have high population densities, and embraced a
form of constitutional monarchy after a period of civil war. Japan was Asia’s first nation to industrialise,
as Britain was Europe’s. Both rose to economic pre-eminence by the manufacture and sale of cloth.
Britain, particularly in the Victorian era, was infamous for its rigid social hierarchy, so too was Meiji
Japan. The English had a state religion: the Church of England, the Japanese have their own: Shinto.
Both cultures engage in a starry-eyed adoration of their royalty and aristocracy (though Japan’s
aristocracy was subsequently banned by the United States’s post-war constitution). Both cultures
venerated a romanticised and largely imagined feudal past, with codes of knightly chivalry in the
Norma era and the samurai’s code of bushido. Both even have a veneration for tea, going so far as to
create a ceremony for its enjoyment (in England the Duchess of Devonshire’s ‘afternoon tea’ became a
custom that soon became fashionable, while Japan’s tea ceremony has an almost religious significance).
Niall Ferguson presciently identifies the prejudices of World War II’s propaganda as rendering these
similarities hard for Westerners to acknowledge, preferring, as he says, ‘to accentuate the “otherness” of
inter-war Japan’4.
The continent of Europe used to be divided into East, West, and Central Europe, then in 1945
Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ descended. In the aftermath of World War II lines were drawn definitively,
and simply, and it was nearly always a case of ‘them’ and ‘us’; communism versus capitalism. This
Manichean view has given away to a more pluralist world view today, one in which communism
has largely been discredited, albeit on capitalist grounds. Capitalism itself has changed beyond all
recognition (yet again), and has even begun to take on Chinese characteristics. It might be useful now
to redraw the map of Europe, reinstating the Central portion of it, whence we might be less likely to
always be looking out for a great ‘Other’ in order to help us define ourselves. Perhaps then we might be
able to see a world of many ‘Others’, of which we were simply another one.
Wu Di 2550-2140 BCE
Xia 2140-1711
Shang 1711-1066
Zhou 1066-256
(Eastern Zhou) 770-256
Spring and Autumn / Warring States 770-221
Qin 306-206
Western Han 206-25 CE
Eastern Han 25-106
Three Kingdoms
Wei 220-265
Han 221-265
Wu 222-277
Western Jin 265-317
Eastern Jin 317-420
Southern and Northern Song 420-479
Qi 479-502
Liang 502-557
Chen 557-581
Sui 581-618
Tang 618-907
Five Dynasties
Liang, Tang, Jin, Han, Zhou 907-960
Song 960-1101
Southern Song 1101-1279
Yuan 1206-1368
Ming 1368-1644
Qing 1616-1912
Republic 1912-1949
People’s Republic 1949-present
224
Appendix 3: Chinese Inventions
Note: The Chinese were among the first in the world to invent the following; they did not, however, in-
vent the rickshaw, which began to be used in Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century either
the innovation of an American called Jonathan Scobie or an unnamed French priest (sources vary).
Abacus
Acupuncture
Bells
Brandy
Calendars
Chess
China
Compasses
Crossbows
Decimal system
Drilling for oil
Fireworks
Fishing reel
Flame thrower
Flush toilet
Gunpowder
Horse collar
Hot-air balloon
Iron plough
Kites
Lacquer
Matches
Mechanical clock
Negative numbers
Paper
Paper money
Parachute
Porridge
Print making
Rudders
Relief maps
Seismograph
Silk
Stirrups
Suspension bridge
Tea
Toilet paper
Water pumps
Wheelbarrow
Whisky
Umbrella
225
Appendix 4: Chinese Terms
Note: some of these terms were introduced into the Chinese language for the first time in Shanghai.
Definitions have been taken from the ‘Gudai Hanyu Zidian’ dictionary. These terms have been translit-
erated into roman letters using the pinyin system unless otherwise indicated. I am grateful for the assis-
tance of Darren Ying and Robert Cortlever in helping with the preparation of this glossary.
Buye cheng
Sleepless city
Chang
Open space; open air; citizens (i.e. not official); flat, open area; farmers’ market; a process (beginning to
end); defunct (as occurring in a phrase in Chinese: to be disappointed at the end of a process); process of
watching a film; examination place (archaic)
Dahai
Dajie
Dao
Way
De
Virtue
Di
Earth
Di fang
Place, a place for people to gather; its function defines the use for the place
Dong
East
226
Dongfang Bali
Fanhua
Wealth
Feiji chang
Airport
Feng
Wind
Feng shui
Geomancy
Fuyu
Prosperity
Gong
Public (lit. anti-private: the bottom part of the character means ‘private’, while the top denotes ‘anti’);
publicly owned; common; justice; equality; generous; it can also be used as a noun for a mode of ad-
dress (e.g. like calling someone ‘sir’ – a high-level officer, a father, grandfather, etc.); all the people at a
particular time, in an historical time; respect towards a person; the car assigned to a high official
Gong yuan
Public park
Guang xi
Network of relationships
Gumin
Stock-crazed speculator(s)
Hai
Sea, ocean
Hao
227
He
Harmony
Small man
Jia
House, home, family (the character jia depicts a pig under a roof and in putonghua jiu is a homonym
for ‘a long time’, hence something that lasts – like a family connection); region ruled by a clan (e.g. guo
jia – archaic); school of thought, bai jia (the hundred schools). As a concept it is not unlike the Greek
oikos: a basic economic unit of society consisting of the house, home, family; a hearth, a household, in-
cluding children, slaves, etc.
Jie
Street
Jue de
To think (as in to feel); to feel; to be sensitive; the things one felt; emotions
Kai
To turn on, to drive, to boil (water); to open a door, a box, etc.; to occupy a place (after having won a
battle); to open up a country; open (an abstract concept in poetry); to expand; to explore virgin territory;
to establish; to set up (a system, a school, an office, etc.); departing
Li
Deference
Lu
Road
Modeng
Modern
Ren
Love, benevolence
Ren wei
To think (as in to reason); thoughts one has towards a person or matter; judgment; opinion; claim
228
Shan
Mountain
Shan shui
Landscape
Shang
Above (e.g. Shanghai: above or on the sea), at the beginning of (e.g. shang ke: at the start of class)
Shanghai
Shikumen
Shimao
Fashion
Shui
Water
Siheyuan
Courtyard house
Tian
Sky, heaven
Tiandi
Tong xiang
Wenming
Civilisation
Xi
West
229
Xia
Xin
New
Xintiandi
Xiang
To think (as in to intend); thinking; to miss somebody; to anticipate; to intend; intention; choice (context
dependant, e.g. choosing a restaurant or a travel destination, etc.); imagination; to imagine
Xiang dui
Yang fang
Foreign mansion(s)
Zhong guo
Zuo
To ride in (e.g. a car or a train) but not to ride on (as with a bicycle or a horse); to sit (on the ground);
the place you sit; to commit a crime (archaic); to prove; to explain
230
Appendix 5: Chinese Philosophy and Religion
This is a rather daunting task: the attempt to summarise two-and-a-half millennia of Chinese philosophy.
No pretence is being made that what is about to be presented will have any great profundity, it is
intended merely to give an overview of the basic tenets of the different philosophical and religions
movements that exist in China in order to provide some background understanding to the Chinese
mentalité. Beginning with Confucianism we will look at Confucius’s The Analects as well as the work
of Mencius and Xunzi; with Daoism the works of Laozi and Zhuangzi will be examined; and this brief
summary will end with a note on Buddhism before moving onto what can be called other philosophies
(for want of a better term), that is to say other ways of thinking that have influenced the way in which
Chinese people live. Particular attention will be paid to the pseudo-science of feng shui because of its
very real effects on China’s built environment. While this may seem to be too bold an endeavour – the
attempt to sum up such a wealth of experience and profundity of thought in a mere few pages – it can
perhaps be justified by quoting the old Chinese saying: ‘Everything we have heard can be said in three
words’1. As Hyun Höchsmann points out, in the West those words would probably be Truth, Beauty, and
Goodness, but in China these would be four: Dao, De, Ren, and He – Way, Virtue, Love, and Harmony2.
Studies of philosophy in China tend to follow one of two approaches: the historical or the
comparative. The historical concentrates on a philological analysis of original texts, while the
comparative attempts to identify the core concepts underlying them. The history of philosophy in
China is generally divided into three main periods: the first is known as the classical, and dated from
the sixth to the second century BCE, the second period, from the first to the tenth century CE, and saw
the introduction and increased ascendancy of Buddhism, while the third period, from the eleventh to
the sixteenth century, saw a renaissance in Confucianism, which is more commonly known as Neo-
Confucianism.
The classical period produced forceful and original conceptions of morality, with the major
schools being Confucianism and Daoism. Confucius was interested in cultivating ethical conduct based
on benevolence and righteousness. His sayings were gathered together into a book called Lun Yu (The
Analects) and it was the work of Mencius and Xunzi, much like the apostles who followed Jesus, who
helped to consolidate Confucius’s position as China’s greatest sage. Mencius constructed a system
of ethics based on the basic idea that human nature was good, while Xunzi did something similar but
basing his work on the notion that man was essentially evil.
Daoism is older than Confucianism, but only just, it was launched by a text of Laozi called the
Dao De Jing (The Way and Its Power). The later philosopher Zhuangzi expanded Laozi’s notion of the
dao, where he embraced freedom and spontaneity in his call to live in harmony with all beings. There
were other schools in this classical period, as well as other thinkers: Mozi, the Legalists, the Logicians,
and the Yin Yang school, etc., however, Confucianism and Daoism are two of the three most influential
of China’s philosophies/religions (Buddhism is the third) and it will difficult enough to try and convey
their basic tenets without the distraction of examining other movements of less moment.
Buddhism, as we have just seen, was the third of China’s three most important philosophies/
religions. It was introduced from India about the first century CE and marked the beginning of China’s
second philosophical period. Buddhism influenced the whole of society. By the fifth century it had
become firmly established in the north of the country and by the seventh it had become the third main
philosophical and religious tradition. Buddhism and Daoism had an oddly symbiotic relationship,
with Buddhism’s more overt religiousity sparking off a more colourful phase of Daoist worship (with
the erection of three-dimensional tableaux in Daoist temples depicting scenes from Hell, etc.); while
Daoism’s slippery thinking is in turn an influence on Buddhism, leading to the Chan or Zen School of
Confucianism
Confucius (also known as K’ung-tzu, K’ung-fu-tzu, Kong-zi, Kong-fu-zi, etc.) was born in 551 BCE
in the feudal state of Lu (which now forms part of the north-central coastal province of Shantung),
China. His name has achieved the same sort of status for the Chinese as Shakespeare has for the
English or Goethe for the Germans. He died in 479 BCE leaving behind a school of philosophy that
has influenced Chinese society right up to the present day. According to Paul Strathern, the sixth
century BCE was arguably the most significant in human evolution. It witnessed the establishment of
Confucianism, and Taoism, as well as the actual birth of Buddha, not to mention the inception of Greek
philosophy in the West3.
According to The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion, Confucius had a strong
sense of vocation, voluntarily submitting to the mandate of heaven (t’ien-ming)4. Confucius set about
salvaging the ideals of the ancients from their long decline. He reformulated and systematically re-
ordered their thoughts and ideas, gathering them into a body of work known as The Analects (Lun
Yu). Confucius sought to guide people in how to live ethically, and through the sheer range and clarity
of his ideas he was able to unite diverse ways of thought and connect the customs of a vast and
complex civilisation into a set of moral principles acceptable to all5. In the Western Han (206-225 CE),
Confucianism became state orthodoxy and remained so until the twentieth century. His ideas shaped the
moral values and practices, as well as providing the foundation for political thought, in China and East
Asia.
6 Trans: No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary, also known as Occam’s
razor.
7 Note: The Analects also uses the older Wade-Giles system of transliteration.
8 Confucius, The Anelects, p. 12, footnote 3.
9 Ibid., p. 14.
10 Mencius, D.C. Lau, trans., p. 177.
11 Hyun Höchsmann, On Philosophy in China, p. 26.
12 Ibid., p. 37.
13 Ibid., p. 42.
233
schools and develops them into its own coherent system. It flowered during the Song (960-1279 CE)
and Ming (1368-1644 CE) Dynasties. Neo-Confucian philosophers created an original and penetrating
interpretation of philosophical analysis, they revived classical learning and amalgamated Mohism,
Daoism, and Buddhism into a comprehensive Confucian framework. This remarkable synthesis is seen
as the work of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), who developed Neo-Confucianism into its final form and whose
writings and commentaries on the classic texts exerted a huge influence14. Philosophical writing in
China is remarkably free of the sort of technical vocabulary or jargon that so often mars comparable
writing in the West. The difficulty lies in transliterating some of these subtly nuanced Chinese notions
into accurate English, or any other Western language, something that we will be taking a look at in the
next chapter (which deals with language).
Daoism
Dao (also spelled Tao) literally translates into English as the ‘Way’, and according to The Encyclopedia
of Eastern Philosophy and Religion it may also denote ‘Teaching’15. It can also mean a road or a path,
and applied to human actions it is the way in which one does something16. The idea of the dao was first
formulated by Laozi in his Dao De Jing and was developed by Zhuangzi. Daoism searches for a way
of understanding reality and derives a knowledge of life from the way things are. The dao is the way in
which the universe, and everything in it, develops. According to the dao all things form one great con-
tinuum, one huge chain of being. The dao conceives of reality as constantly in flux, undergoing an eter-
nal process of transformation17.
The dao has long resonated in Western philosophy, most notably recently in Heidegger’s work
where it can be seen to relate to notion of the Weg18, and it was the Jesuits (who first translated the Dao
De Jing) who imbued the dao with religious significance. While the dao is understood as the origin of
all things, and as such somewhat analogous with the idea of a creator or God, the concept of the dao of
Heaven has no connotation with a personal God; according to Hyun Höchsmann, ‘Heaven stands for an
objective source of universal morality, the standpoint of just and fair perspective rather than a personal
deity who can be placated with sacrifices and prayers and dispenses justice or oversees the salvation
of individual souls’19. All Daoists strive to become one with the dao, this cannot be achieved by trying
to understand it intellectually; the Daoist adept becomes one with the dao by realising within himself
its unity, simplicity, and emptiness. Daoism has developed a number of practices to facilitate this and
both the Zhuangzi and the Dao De Jing contain guidelines for producing a state of meditative absorp-
tion. Breathing exercises are important in this, either as a preliminary practice or as a means of enhanc-
ing the meditative process (which also ties into the common Chinese practice of tai chi chuan).
The Dao De Jing is Daoism’s most important text. It is a collection of aphorisms on various
subjects unified under the theme of ‘the way and its power’. Consisting of eighty-one short stanzas,
each expressing a philosophical reflection, it often draws upon well-known proverbs in order to make a
fresh point. Generally understood to have been written by Laozi (whose name literally translates as Old
Master, he was also known as Lao-tzu, Lao Tan, or Li Erh), who was about fifty years older than Con-
fucius, it is he who is considered the father of Daoism.
The biography of Laozi in the Historical Records (Shih-chi), dating from the second and first
centuries BCE, mentions that he was born in Hu-hsien in the state of Ch’u (now Hunan Province)20.
Once Chuang Chou [Zhungzi] dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around,
happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he
woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was
Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.
Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Trans-
formation of Things.23
This is perhaps the most famous excerpt from all of Chinese philosophy, it is certainly one of
the most charming. Versions of the story differ, some have the butterfly falling asleep and dreaming it
is Chuang Chou; this version has been quoted as it was felt that the Burton Watson translation is a reli-
able source. Chuang Chou (369-286 BCE) is better known as Zhuangzi (but he is also known as Chuang
Tzu). He was one of, if not the, most original philosophers in all of China, and the book of his sayings,
simply called Zhuangzi, has to be one of the most entertaining as well as one of the most profound
books in world literature. After the rigours of the Confucian thinkers, Hyun Höchsmann likens read-
ing Zhuangzi as comparable to the emergence of the Romantic movement after the Enlightenment24.
Zhuangzi takes Laozi’s depictions of the dao and renders them more vivid by using daring language
and startling images. He rarely resorts to argument to persuade, instead he juxtaposes allegories and
analogies, and he dazzles with subtle paradoxes. Truth for Zhuangzi is not something that can be estab-
lished by winning an argument or reaching a consensus, truth is something that may be apprehended by
considering things from the standpoint of their actual use, and regarding them from the point of their
correlation to other things. (How remarkably this seems to resonate with Michel Foucault’s notions of
discourse.) To insist on the truth of an individual perspective is to be like a frog in a well, a creature that
can only judge the sky as seen from the opening at the top of the well25. Zhuangzi’s celebrated passage
about the butterfly invites us to ponder on the bewildering possibility that the whole of existence might
be nothing more than a dream, a theme that has long featured in the West, although often in a more
overtly fanciful form than in the East, with anything from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to the recent
film trilogy The Matrix.
Burton Watson thinks the central theme of Zhuangzi can be summed up in one word: freedom.
Nearly all the philosophers of China addressed themselves to the problem of how man was to live in
a world of chaos, suffering, and absurdity; and they tended to suggest practical solutions for doing so.
Zhuangzi took a very different approach, he sought for man to free himself from the world. Confucian-
ism and Daoism are sometimes seen as being opposed to one another, with the former advocating the
cultivation of the virtues of benevolence and righteousness and the latter urging us to follow the way or
Buddhism
Buddhism was introduced into China from India as early as the first century CE and it became the
third major philosophical and religious movement during the Sui and Tang dynasties (589-907 CE).
Buddhist missionaries proselytised in China, and Chinese pilgrims went to India to collected sacred
texts: a vast literature known as the Tripitaka, translated from the Sanskrit27. The historical figure most
often associated with Buddhism is a Prince of the royal family of Shakya, a small kingdom in present-
day Nepal. He was born in 563 BCE and his name was Siddhartha Gautama, hence is known as the
Gautama Buddha. He is also known as Shakyamuni Buddha, which means the Buddha of the Silent
Sage of the Shakyas. He was not the only one to attain buddhahood, neither was he the first28. The term
buddha means ‘awakened one’ and denotes a person who has achieved enlightenment, which releases
one from the cycle of existence (samsara) to attain complete liberation (nirvana)29. There are two types
of buddha: the pratyeka-buddha, a completely enlightened one who does not teach; and the samyak-
sambuddha, who does30.
Buddhism sees life as suffering and seeks to free us from this suffering by nullifying our desires,
for it is our desires which anchor us to the world. The world is, of course, transitory and fleeting, and it
is our desires, because we crave them so badly, which cause us so much suffering. The immortality of
the soul has been a topic of considerable concern in the West, with the possibility of bliss in the afterlife
being held up as a sort of prize for good conduct in this one (or eternal damnation for those who fall
prey to the wiles of the Evil One). Buddhism’s notion of rebirth is distinct from this in the belief that
the soul will be reborn in this world. This rebirth is not some afterlife detached from this one, neither
is it the case that some individual soul gets carried forward, it is the character of what had been the
original or latest person that gets carried forward, and as such this is different from the Indian idea of
the transmigration of souls. In Hinduism the concern is with the universal soul (brahman), which is the
highest knowledge the individual soul (atman) can attain to. The crucial difference here, and one that
makes Buddhism so remarkable, is that the goal is not eternal life but an eventual liberation from the
cycles of birth and rebirth.
Buddhism in China brought a new understanding to what constituted a moral life, and during
the tenth-century Song Dynasty, a time when other schools of thought were languishing, Buddhism
stimulated China’s philosophically inclined scholars31. Buddhist doctrines were often explained in
terms of Daoist ideas, which led, as we have seen, to Daoism being influenced by it; but this influence
has mainly been on religious rather than philosophical Daoism32. The fundamental difference between
religious Daoism and Buddhism is that the former sees preservation of life as the desired goal, while the
latter seeks enlightenment by letting go of attachment to it. To put it simply: Daoism can be seen as an
33 Ibid., p. 125.
34 Ibid., p. 126.
35 Ibid., p. 133.
237
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nl (accessed 21 July 2008 – paper not available on website)
5. Moya Pellitero, Ana, The Image of the Urban Landscape: The re-discovery of the city
through different spaces of perception, (Doctoral Thesis, TU Eindhoven, 2007)
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Discography
1. ‘The Wrong Empire’, Volume 4 (1689-1836), A History of Britain (Simon Schama), BBC
Worldwide Ltd. (2002)
2. Le Roi Danse, Arti Film/K2 Films (2003)
3. Lust, Caution, Buena Vista Home Entertainment (no release date)
4. Mission: Impossible III, Paramount Pictures (2006)
5. Shanghai Triad, Sony Pictures Classics (1994)
6. The Painted Veil, Warner China Film HG Corporation (2007)
7. The White Countess, Sony Pictures Classics (2006)
8. Think Fast, Mr Moto, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation (1937)
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CURRICULUM VITÆ
Secondary education
• Newbridge College, Newbridge, Co. Kildare, Ireland (1980-86).
Tertiary education
• M.Sc.Arch. (specialisation in urbanism) – TU Delft, The Netherlands (2004).
• B.Sc.Arch. – Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland (1992).
• Dip.Arch. – Bolton Street, CoT, Dublin, (1992).
Special qualifications
• M.Sc.Arch., cum laude.
• B.Sc.Arch. and Dip.Arch., distinction in thesis.
Ph.D. research
• Architecture Theory Department, TU Delft, The Netherlands.
• Prof. Dr. Arie Graafland, promoter.
245
Published by:
Faculty of Architecture,
TU Delft, Julianalaan 134,
2628 BL, Delft,
The Netherlands.
246
247
THINKING SHANGHAI
THINKING SHANGHAI
A Foucauldian Interrogation of the Postsocialist Metropolis
思
Gregory Bracken
THINKING SHANGHAI
China’s recent re-emergence as a world power is one of the transformative events of our
念
time, and the most visible manifestations of the country’s continuing rise can be seen in its
two greatest cities: Beijing and Shanghai. Since its inception as a colonial enclave in 1842,
Gregory Bracken
Shanghai has been one of the world’s largest, richest, and most important cities. Traditionally
it has set the pace of change in China, and acted as a model for the rest of the country, both as
上
an icon of capitalism before 1949 and as a paragon of state-planning after that period. Shang-
hai today, with a population of approximately 20 million, is a mega-city, and the sometimes
bewildering pace of development since 1990 has seen it grow even richer as it re-emerges
onto the international stage. Zhu Rongji has compared Shanghai to New York, and even Time
海
magazine has labelled the city ‘a rival to New York City as the “Center of the World” in the
21st century’. This investigation asks can Shanghai indeed become the New York of Asia?
And as it does so it also investigates Shanghai’s role in a world where one of the most interest-
ing developments unfolding in the 21st century will be not so much the effects globalisation is
having on China, rather the effects China is having on globalisation.
TU Delft